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Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction

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…

Last week we found that, assuming effectively infinite land and reasonably high yields, our farmers produced enough to maintain their households fairly securely in relative comfort, with enough surplus over even their respectability needs to potentially support a small population of non-farmers. And of course that kind of ‘land scarcity’ problem seems to have motivated both ancient and early modern settler-colonialism: if you put farmers next to flat, open ground owned by another community, it won’t be too long before they try to make it farmland (violently expelling the previous owners in the process). But then – and remember, these choices are coming as you are facing diminishing marginal returns on each day of labor you put in – is it really worth your time to cultivate a couple more fields in order to just get a bit more meat in your diet and have slightly nicer household goods?

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