500 Years of Peasant Resistance in Europe: From the Great Peasant War to Contemporary Rural Struggles

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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.

About the Contributors

Morgan Ody is a peasant in Bretagne, France, a member of Confédération Paysanne, of the committee of the European Coordination Via Campesina and General Coordinator of La Via Campesina International.

Saturnino (‘Jun’) M. Borras, Jr. is Professor of Agrarian Studies at the International Institute of Social Studies (Netherlands), and is part of the Erasmus Professors Programme of Erasmus University Rotterdam. He is an associate of the Transnational Institute. He was editor in chief of the Journal of Peasant Studies for fifteen years, until 2023, and a member of the International Coordinating Committee of La Via Campesina in 1993–1996. He is a coauthor of Scholar-Activism and Land Struggles.

Silvia Federici is a feminist writer, teacher, and militant whose work has been central to Marxist feminist theory. She cofounded the International Feminist Collective in 1972 and helped launch the international Wages for Housework campaign, contributing decisively to the theorization of social reproduction, autonomy, and the commons. Federici taught at Hofstra University from 1987 to 2005 and later cofounded the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa. Her books and essays address women’s history, capitalism, globalization, and feminist alternatives to dominant economic models.

Julien-François Gerber is a Swiss social ecologist at the International Institute of Social Studies (Netherlands). He is interested in the political economy of flourishing and alienation, and has written on capitalism, agrarian change, social movements, psychoanalysis, and spiritual ecology. His latest book is Degrowth: Revitalizing Critical Development Studies.

Andrej Grubačić is a world historian, Balkan federalist, and professor of anthropology and social change at the California Institute of Integral Studies. He has coauthored, among others, Wobblies and Zapatistas and Living at the Edges of Capitalism: Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid.

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