If like me you are a baby boomer of European extraction, then odds are that some of your grandparents were peasants. One of my grandmothers was born in a sod cabin of her father’s own construction on the Nebraska plains. One of my grandfathers made his living buying hides from peasants and selling them to leather makers in Slovakia. The English were the great exception; most of their peasants (if they ever had them – a point in dispute among historians) were wiped out by the agricultural revolution of the 18th century. But the Scottish and Welsh peasantries persisted longer, and the Irish longer still.

Patrick Joyce, a distinguished social historian (who will probably hate being called distinguished), is the son of just such Irish peasants, who left Counties Mayo and Wexford to seek work in England in the 1930s. Having paid tribute to them in his last book, Going to My Father’s House, he now offers an ‘homage’ to their kind, the European peasantry as a whole, and the ‘old world’ which is actually not that old at all. Even in France and Germany peasants comprised 40 per cent of the population at the time of the First World War, now only one or two per cent. Eastern Europe was 80 per cent peasant at the time of the First World War, now under ten per cent, except for Romania where nearly a quarter still cling, precariously and often part-time, to the soil. The rest of the world is belatedly following suit; in the 1980s half the world’s population was engaged in agriculture, now under a quarter.

Drawing on rich ethnographies of peasant life, principally from Ireland, Poland and Italy, Joyce paints a vivid picture of that life in all its particularities and hardships, but he doesn’t skimp on its everyday pleasures. Though work is not dwelt upon, the hard life in the home is, grimly illustrated with black-and-white photos that sometimes look almost Neolithic, sometimes very 20th-century, with the Irish men at rest dressed in their Sunday best. Family ties, family feuding and hostility to the state characterise peasants across the breadth of Europe. Joyce is particularly good on the thin partitions that divide nature, the supernatural and religion in peasant cosmologies, spirits of places, animals and humans moving easily from one realm to the other, including into Catholicism. Below the surface is always simmering anger, breaking out in violence against landowners, the state and urban elites, though Joyce tends to let the peasants off from blame for pogroms, acknowledging the ‘everyday aggression of Christian peasants against Jews’, but attributing pogroms to townspeople and the authorities.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Peter Mandler teaches modern British history at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. His latest book is The Crisis of the Meritocracy: Britain’s Transition to Mass Education since the Second World War (Oxford University Press, 2020).