Urgent, sweeping, and deeply relevant, this book offers a powerful new framework for understanding rural Europe and the political battles that will shape its future.

For centuries, Europe’s peasants have been dismissed as relics of a vanished world, swept aside by industrialization, modernization, and capitalist progress. This groundbreaking collection argues otherwise. From the German Peasants’ War to contemporary struggles over debt, land, food sovereignty, and ecological survival, peasant-farmers have remained at the center of resistance to the destructive forces reshaping rural life.

Bringing together farmers, scholar-activists, and researchers, this volume traces five hundred years of rebellion, organizing, repression, and renewal across rural Europe. It explores major agrarian uprisings, the political uses and abuses of peasant identity, and today’s explosive conflicts over trade, climate crisis, and the future of food systems. Along the way, it challenges the myth that peasant politics belong to the past.

Neither romanticizing nor dismissing rural movements, the contributors confront their tensions and contradictions, including entanglements with nationalism, patriarchy, and fascism, while also illuminating the radical possibilities emerging from struggles for commons, autonomy, dignity, and democratic control over land and food. At a moment of ecological breakdown and social upheaval, it shows why peasant struggles remain essential to any serious vision of socioecological transformation today.