Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction
Bret Devereaux Collections, The Peasant September 12, 2025 31 Minutes This is the third piece of the fourth part of our series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb) looking at the lives of pre-modern peasant farmers – a majority of all of the humans who have ever lived. Last time, we started looking at the subsistence of peasant agriculture by considering the productivity of our model farming families under basically ideal conditions: relatively good yields and effectively infinite land. This week we’re going to start peeling back those assumptions in light of the very small farm-sizes and capital availability our pre-modern peasants had. Last week we found that, assuming effectively infinite land and reasonably high yields, our farmers produced enough to maintain their households…
