Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World

by Patrick Joyce

A landmark new history of the peasant experience, exploring a now neglected way of life that once encompassed most of humanity but is vanishing in our time.

“What the skeleton is to anatomy, the peasant is to history, its essential hidden support.” For over the past century and a half, and still more rapidly in the last seventy years, the world has become increasingly urban, and the peasant way of life—the dominant way of life for humanity since agriculture began well over 6,000 years ago—is disappearing. In this new history of peasantry, social historian Patrick Joyce aims to tell the story of this lost world and its people, and how we can commemorate their way of life. In one sense, this is a global history, ambitious in scope, taking us from the urbanization of the early 19th century to the present day. But more specifically, Joyce’s focus is the demise of the European peasantry and of their rites, traditions, and beliefs.

Alongside this he brings in stories of individuals as well as places, including his own family, and looks at how peasants and their ways of life have been memorialized in photographs, literature, and in museums. Joyce explores a people whose voice is vastly underrepresented in human history and is usually mediated through others. And now peasants are vanishing in one of the greatest historical transformations of our time.

Written with the skill and authority of a great historian, Remembering Peasants is a landmark work, a richly complex and passionate history written with exquisite care. It is also deeply resonant, as Joyce shines a light on people whose knowledge of the land is being irretrievably lost during our critical time of climate crisis and the rise of industrial agriculture. Enlightening, timely, and vitally important, this book commemorates an extraordinary culture whose impact on history—and the future—remains profoundly relevant.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Ireland, European History, Memoir, Irish Literature, World History

400 pages, Hardcover

Published February 20, 2024

Reviews

[History Today]

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).

[Moonkiszt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World is a look over our shoulder at where and who we came from.

The last generations of peasants are just about gone, their ways of living with them. So much of what we have taken from them, learned from them is what we have used to build up societies they would barely understand or recognize their hand in any of it.

With a focus on European peasantry, this is a book filled with observations and photographs from far and wide, in times, places and ways of meeting the needs of livelihood. Farmers, livestock ranchers, all stripes of that lower class named "peasant" are carefully, respectfully and - I think - fondly considered by Patrick Joyce.

This is a book I've thought of often after reading it initially, and have paged through it again a few more times. I will be keeping it available on my shelves. It reminds us what we are missing, and that we need to think about some of the "old ways" that are worth revisiting.

*A sincere thank you to Patrick Joyce, Scribner, and NetGalley for an ARC to read and review independently.*

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting and occasionally frustrating, a baggy book about a class of people that left really no documents behind them other than what someone personally experienced or some curator decided should be preserved. Joyce focuses on three specific areas of Europe: Ireland, where his family is from, Poland and Italy. The subtitle does say it is a 'personal' history, which accounts to some degree for its bagginess. In the absence of documentary history to refer to, the author takes the opportunity for philosophical ruminations about ideas like the nature of time for peasants and other aspects of their worldview. It's somewhat unfortunate that he does not take France into his scope, it seems to me there might be more preserved material and also there was at least one book written about the seventeenth century peasantry of France. However, the book would have then been quite a lot bigger.

He takes pains to point out that we ought not idealize the often nasty, brutish, and short lives of these peasants, but he kind of does anyway. I mean, yes, it's true, we are less in tune with the nature of the land and the seasons and have less of a relationship to the earth, to our cost. But we are also not losing 60% of every family of children to diphtheria and polio before the age of five, or dying in huge numbers of smallpox and the plague, so ... ?? And it's hard to avoid the feeling sometimes that there is a little of the "noble savage" going on.

The most interesting chapter involved his visits to museums of peasant culture in the three nations he covers - how the information in them is presented, how it is and is not representative of the lives of the people themselves, how it is commoditized for modern tourists. The implications of this seem the most sinister in Poland, where the sites of many death camps are virtually unmarked and the museums about peasants talk up how Polish peasants helped Jews - one way Poland is trying to flee and deny its role in the holocaust is to idealize its peasants. Visitors are discouraged or even prevented from asking any questions by the strict time limits on visits to the museum and the way guides rush them along - sounds like the guides in Russian palaces in the 1970s.

If you are coming to this book for lots of historical information about the European peasantry, you'll go away disappointed. This is more an extended meditation on the positive aspects, as the author sees them, of a way of life that essentially no longer exists.

[Hannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reads like a bogged-down, convoluted thesis, and I was so looking forward to this book, as my family was largely comprised of Polish peasants.

Joyce’s book had a lot of potential, but there’s no cohesion to it, no sense of chronology; Joyce will quote a 21st-century source (usually secondary) in one sentence and then a 17th-century source in the next, despite talking about the peasantry of the 19th and 20th centuries.

[Jen · Rating 3 out of 5]

There’s some great interesting nuggets of peasant lives and interesting stories. It just felt like I had to find them in some longer winded set ups. I think a different organization might have helped it for me; I liked it, but it came at a price.

[Erin Gallacher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ummm kind of changed the way I’ve thought about everything ever

[Marks54 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an outstanding memoir and personal history of peasants, mostly in the Irish and European contexts. I have read a lot about peasants in reading European history but this is the first book I have seen that put it together and focuses on peasants as a critical social grouping throughout Ireland, England, and Europe.

A more extended review of this to follow.

[Desirae · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a well written account of the vanishing life of the subsistence “farmer.” I put farmer in quotations, because the role is at its heart agricultural, but it encompasses a variety of survival functions. A Renaissance man of the earth so to speak. The peasants of the Caribbean were largely forced into slavery, and the Europeans met a variety of fates, but nearly always displaced or starved out. Or worse. The story can’t be told without touching on man’s inhumanity to man. But there is also much about the perception of time as the transition is made. It is all wrapped in the personal story of the author’s family. For the overwhelming majority of us, our ancestors were peasants. This is our story too.

[Rome Doherty · Rating 3 out of 5]

I look at this book two ways. As an erudite, intellectual, widely discoursing survey, or as a overly pretensions, metaphorical, bag of gas. Either way works. It reminds me of my undergraduate day, having deep conversations on limited knowledge. One problem is that in my old age I starting to prefer facts to concepts. Generalization from stories doesn't persuade me anymore. On the other hand, the information in this book is amazing and important, and some of the poetic riffs are wonderful. Quibbles: 1. the author talks a lot of how important photographs are, yet the ones in the book show poorly on the same paper as the text, and are too small. 2. You never know when he is going to divert us with another story of his own family. So 3 stars, not 4.

[Leena · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting book regarding what it meant to be a peasant in Ireland, how they lived, and their belief system. Despite it being a personal history, the author also talked about/compared peasants in Poland and Russia, to name a few.
Then, the book lost traction in the last two sections, where it felt like hurried rambling instead of compartive research with a strong conclusion.

[Care · Rating 4 out of 5]

content warnings:

Graphic: Classism
Moderate: Religious bigotry, Violence, War, Colonisation, and Antisemitism

[Senne van der Vliet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Erg boeiend verhaal (behalve het vage uitstapje over musea en wat erfgoed wel danwel niet inhoudt)

[Rudi · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 sterren , het onderwerp heeft hoge interesse voor mij , ik kan me perfect de geuren van een boerderij voorstellen , ze liggen in mijn geheugen , …
Het boek zelf was een mengeling van biografie, filosofie, economie, aardrijkskunde, geschiedenis , …. De mengeling was voor mij niet altijd even geslaagd ,
Het boek heeft me wel wat doen nadenken met en zonder nostalgische bril , / economie … ik vind het soms jammer dat er in de land/tuinbouw voedingsindustrie (moet?…) gewerkt worden met veredelde slaven , dat vind mijn menswezen niet correct en zorgt automatisch voor een gebrek aan respect wat ethisch niet juist is , / geschiedenis. Veel feestdagen en vrijetijdsbestedingen stoeten enz lijken wat verworteld te zijn met boerentijden , …. Door de verandering van organisatie van boerenbedrijven en meer recenter door de verandering van klimaat lijken deze vrijetijdsbestedingen ook soms wat verloren te vallen net als de (oude) boerenstempel , …
/ aardrijkskunde. De land en tuinbouwgronden lijken soms ook wat door schaalvergroting uit hun plooi te vallen of om er industrie/ woon / natuurgebied bestemming aan te geven , ..
4 sterren 7/8000 jaar geleden begon de mens te boeren gewassen te veredelen dieren te domesticeren, nu lijkt er voor de komende decennia een nieuwe verandering op te treden naar ik weet niet precies wat , jacht en visvangst zal het ook niet kunnen worden of men zal de populaties moeten 3 d printen
Jacht en visvangst, dan boeren. , en nu , wat nu ? En wat kan er eigenlijk anders uit sapiens zijn mouw geschud worden als ie wil eten , … ingebouwde batterijen ?
4 sterren filosofische beschouwingen over de boerenstiel ,

[Alexis Kaelin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a little slow and sad in the beginning, but it quickly picked up. Well worth the read.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review tk

[Richard Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nearly everyone in Europe was a peasant for centuries until mass migration to the cities began with the industrial revolution and the enclosure movement two hundred years ago, so the vast majority of those of us who are of European descent have peasants in our ancestry. Now that world is gone, with most of the rural poor having migrated to cities and with immigrants from other poorer lands having become the majority of the working poor in modern industrial agriculture. Peasants lived hard lives that included oppressive overlords and extra measures of poverty, illiteracy, disease and, too often, starvation. There was no electricity or refrigeration. Heat came from a fire, cooling from the shade of a tree. The main theme of the life of a peasant was survival. Still Mr. Joyce manages to drum up a measure of nostalgia for this lost world. Colorful customs have disappeared or have been preserved in metaphorical formaldehyde. The peasant's sense of time, of nature and of spiritual matters were very different from how we think of these things in the contemporary world, and in some respects the old ways were better, but it is nearly impossible to recapture the mindset of our ancestors.

This book is not intended to be comprehensive in its scope or academic in its rigor. Mr. Joyce picks examples of peasants' lives and culture from Ireland, Poland and Italy. What about France and Germany and Spain? What about Russia and the rest of Eastern Europe? And even in the countries that he covers, his treatment is anecdotal. Certainly, there were massive differences between countries and over time, so I was suspicious of his generalizations. But in the end, I decided that none of that mattered, because this book was not intended to be a complete history of European peasantry. The key is in the subtitle, "A personal history". It's his personal impressions and is meant to be true and complete more in its emotional tone than it its facts and analysis.

Toward the end of the book, Mr. Joyce references W.G. Sebald and I immediately saw a kinship between this book and Mr. Sebald's work. Mr. Sebald wrote novels that felt factual, but that were largely fictional and that were illustrated with grainy black and white pictures that set the emotional tone. His works were as much about place and time and the nature of memory as they were about character and story, and his worlds were in many ways gray and sad. All of the same things could be said of this book, except that this book is fact written as fiction, rather than being fiction written as fact.

[Phoebe · Rating 3 out of 5]

This lyrical book is nevertheless solid nonfiction, well-researched, clearly close to the heart of the author, whose ancestry is tied to the Irish peasantry. He makes the point that since 1950, there has been a worldwide vanishing of those close to the land, as "the majority of the world's population has come to live an urban life." "...this change is perhaps the most fundamental one the contemporary world has seen, all the other vast changes notwithstanding. 'the most dramatic and far-reaching social change of the second half of this century, and the one which cuts us off forever from the world of the past, is the death of the peasantry.' Joyce describes peasants as the survivors, and talks about the "falling silent" of the countryside, the great decline of the old agricultural world. He says that over 1 billion of the world's population still makes their living in agriculture, with the majority in India and China; India is the greatest peasant nation still remaining on the planet with 43% of its population in agriculture. He states that "vastly increased production is accomplished by vastly fewer workers on the basis of new technologies, mechanization, and bioscience. Nowadays, hobby farmers have to find a living beyond the land as well as on it." There is so much packed into this volume, personal ruminating as well as interesting commentary on things such as what it means to visit a museum--inadequate--"perhaps museums must fail anyway, fail to convey the blistered lips, the chapped hands, the worn body, the sufferings..." This is one of those books on an unusual topic that you never knew you needed to read. Adult.

[Ddoddmccue · Rating 4 out of 5]

Remembering Peasants serves dual roles- as an historic analysis of the vanishing subsistence farmer and a memoir of an accomplished historian recognizing his personal links to this history, and his concerns for how history is now perceived.

The history- The peasant history focuses on Europe (including Ireland, Britain, France, Spain, Italy, broadly Poland), the foundation of communal support to address scarcity, and the decline in response to industrialization, emigration, and political change. The personal tales are balanced with startling statistics and a wide net of supporting scholarship. Not light reading but worth the effort.

The memoir- Patrick Joyce, now 78, reflects upon what he’s uncovered, and it’s rich. The son of Irish peasants transplanted to England, his experiences highlight what was lost and gained by his family’s transition. Joyce, in exploring museums aimed at peasant history, shares his reactions to what is being conveyed and his concerns about the contemporary history tourism.

Two points on the concept of time as noted by Joyce, suggest the impact of the loss of peasantry. 1. Peasant time is circular, dictated by the seasons. Industrialization- and the demise of peasant life- shifts to time as linear, less continuity. 2. The relationship of time as past/present/ future is altered. Peasants, in focusing on farming, had to balance their emphasis on all three. With increased technology and information bombardment, the present- and our effort to respond to it, leaves little time to acknowledge and learn from the past. And in attempting to cope with the present, we are less likely to view the future with the optimism of prior generations.

[Kathy Piselli · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's startling to think of eastern Europe as having been colonized, just like an overseas colony, by Germans, by Russians, by Austria-Hungary. I liked the root of the word "colony" coming from the Latin word "to cultivate" and the root of the word "human" from the Latin for earth or ground. After he establishes the critical need for peasants, the author lays out peasant culture, emphasizing the similarities across countries. Their homes, beliefs, ethics. The peasant stints himself rather than let a servant go hungry. The peasant must pay rent in cash, so he is accustomed to setting aside his best for that purpose and making do with the "smaller, watery" potatoes. Changes after World War II seems to have hastened the demise of the peasant as people fled the countryside for jobs in cities. This also happened in the history of the United States, in successive waves. The author makes his points with a philosophical nostalgia that I had to stop and think about. Especially moving was the bit about losing a child, recommending a story by Máirtín Ó Cadhain, and quoting a grieving woman from Ukraine/Poland addressing her lost daughter ("My daughter, my dissatisfied [daughter]! Did you fear that [by living] you would deprive me of years?!). But we living today do not have these traditions. By the time we reach the end of the book, we realize those alive today are as unrooted as the peasants of our human past were rooted. The book is filled with black and white photos, as well as poetry and songs, that make the author's points. The best of all are the personal details from his ancestors' lives. Great follow-up reading is included.

[Fran Henderson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was dissapointed with this, because it had so much promise! I think the central issue is primarily it is a personal history but also tries to broaden its scope, and it lacks a coherent structure. Lots of the mediations i thought were nice but not overarching. particularly i found Joyce's thoughts on photography boring and tangential to the rest of the book. The peasantry are a neglected topic, but i feel this book was still rather surface level. My other significant problem with this book lamenting the death of peasantry and peasant culture, is that i just dont take it to be true. There are certainly aspects of this, such as idolatry and pilgramages that I have seen first hand in Karnataka of people carrying nothing but the clothes on their back to make 180 mile pilgramages, sleeping in temples and being fed by people on the road. Its super western centric!! But i do think its an upsetting tale of a lost land, much like my grandparents being upset in India seeing parts of their upbringing that are long dead in the UK.

[Alice · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title suggests a long overdue focus on a long overlooked segment of our society, and that is technically true. However it is written in the style of, and perhaps intended to be, a history textbook. Niche history buffs will love this book. Filled with facts and figures, and meticulous in its explanations and footnotes. But it's lacking in the "personal" as described in the title. There is little to no description or anecdotes of peasants' day-to-day lives. The reader doesn't feel any personal connection to the lives of the millions of peasants upon whose backs civilization is literally built. And from whom virtually all of us are descended. Not nearly as interesting as it could have been. Which is a shame, b/c the topic in general deserves to be more widely known.

[NN · Rating 4 out of 5]

The invention of agriculture and its disappearance by means of the agroindustry should be seen as equal gamechangers. With effort we can still see the culture that was ours in the time between those two changes, but the way remembering works is in the way of remembering who we were. The writer has to visit the edges of the old world to catch these glimpses of the last peasants and their cosmology. All through the lens of people who still continue to remember along family lines, the houses, everyday objects and the landscape itself. The peasants appear as a bottom layer underneath political changes and wars that pass over the land. And not just that, their world is still there behind some present day politics, once you can see it.

[Susan Oleksiw · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author, Patrick Joyce, grew up in a dying world of the peasant, which as a population was once spread throughout Europe before shrinking in the face of widespread social and industrial change. As part of that world, Joyce has bittersweet feelings about the cultural loss and has traced the cultural and economic decline with a focus on Ireland, Italy, and Poland. The book is especially strong on the spiritual beliefs of the peasantry, and its relationship with townspeople and those in power. The closing chapters on time as perceived and understood by peasants are striking and engaging.

[Carolyn Harris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Both a memoir of the author's family in rural Ireland and a reflection about peasant life and the disappearance of the peasant worldview from European life. The author draws on examples primarily from Ireland, Italy and Poland with some comparisons to other European peasant cultures such a pre-revolutionary France. The approach is anecdotal rather than systemic but there are some interesting insights regarding folk wisdom concerning nature and the seasonal life cycle. The audiobook is well read.

[Beth Melillo · Rating 3 out of 5]

DNF

"They were outside history. They were at once that which retarded progress and that by which progress could be measured and criticized. Either way, they were outside time, a barrier in the road of progress or the signpost setting progress on the right track."

A really fascinating premise of a book. I was drawn to the subject matter because of it's unique lens on a world which is increasingly receding into the past. Yet, it existed at the start of my lifetime. There was something about that premise which drew me in. A palimpsest in the making.

[Ellen F · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some interesting nuggets in here, but, man, did this book give me whiplash! Constant jumping from country to country, and across centuries, often within a single paragraph. It did not seem to be an organized or exhaustive study, with the reason given that there is almost no written history of peasants by peasants on which to draw. Instead, it was a scattershot approach, with examples pulled in to briefly illustrate a point, dropped, and sometimes pulled back in again.

[Karlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Essentially an interesting and moderately informative book about a little acknowledged but vital part of society. But I found the style of writing awkward, clumsy and repetetive. The writer has limited powers of description and so it is actually hard to evision what for thousands would have been a miserable existence. And as someone else pointed out, where were the French peasants and their tiny holdings. None the less, an important book.

[Claudia Majetich · Rating 2 out of 5]

This really is an extended personal essay. I think that if I were more of a scholar of peasant life, I would appreciate his thoughts. But, I didn't find the book compelling. I recall reading Pig Earth years ago; I was enthralled by that book. Joyce references John Berger a couple of times, and I intend to read the rest of his books. But, this one wasn't for me.

[Carl Palmateer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Once the peasant was the typical person, now they are almost completely gone, a relic found only in museums and reenactments. This book tries to bring back to mind who they were and the factors that led to their transformation. The line the book has to toe is remembering without romanticizing the life of the peasant that more often one of extreme poverty, hardship and death.

[Alistair Leadbetter · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely, slow, philosophical consideration of Europe's peasants, mainly considering those of Ireland, Italy, and Poland. The geography maybe limited but the fundamentals remain.

Many of us are descendants of peasants. I'm only two or three generations away. But this world is gone.