Rice. Palm oil. Chocolate. Silk. Cocaine. From the most universally consumed products to the most exclusive – rural workforces across the world produce them all. But the communities to whom we owe our ways of life receive pittance in return, in money and recognition, and are some of the most ridiculed and exploited.
In this revolutionary work, Dr Maryam Aslany gives the people whose work upholds modern civilisation, but whose own livelihoods are threatened, the attention they deserve. Travelling through the global economy from India to Columbia to Cambodia, Aslany humanises a way of life patronised by governments, corporations and urbanites. Above all, she advocates for the need to protect the communities we currently destroy.
Peasants is the untold story of how corruption and greed affects the poorest first, from an expert with an exciting new vision. In a world where the loudest voices live in the city, Maryam Aslany delivers a compelling defence of the destabilised agriculturalist class, and warns of the danger in forgetting what our economic system is built on.
Peasants
By Maryam Aslany
Trailblazer economist Maryam Aslany reveals the untold story of ‘peasants’, in a much-anticipated exposé of the exploitation of the agricultural class
Material available
Rights Sold
German, Portuguese (Brazilian) and Dutch
Book Details
Imprint: Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) | Pub date: February 2026 | Format: 234 x 153mm | Extent: 352
About the Author
Dr Maryam Aslany is a Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellow at Yale University and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, with a background in economic sociology and political economy. She is also a researcher at Oxford University, where she works on climate change adaptation in the agrarian regions of South Asia. She received her doctorate in Economic Sociology from King’s College London in 2018: her PHD thesis, Contested Capital, was published in 2020. Born and raised in Iran, she has also lived in India and, for the last eleven years, in the UK. She has university degrees in five subjects across physics and social sciences, and has held research positions in France, Australia, India and the Netherlands.
