Agricultural labor

This chapter argues that labor is not only central for understanding agricultural history, but that agricultural labor provides a particularly compelling lens through which to understand human history. The modern world emerged unevenly through hundreds of years of struggle between those who work the land and those who rule over them. There was nothing natural or inevitable about the emergence of industrial agriculture, or the world it sustains. Subsistence farmers initially resisted creating and turning over surpluses to elites, then resisted efforts to reorient their production toward markets, and then continued to struggle against the competitive, exploitative logic of agrarian capitalism. They struggled against forms of agriculture that all too frequently left those who worked the land with little to show for their efforts and beholden to a political and economic class who lived off of their labor. This struggle was a central force driving history.