There has been little comparative work on agrarian classes. While workers have been done to death, peasants have been largely forgotten. Yet in almost all countries farmers constituted the largest population group, the largest voting bloc, and most of the soldiers. This chapter compares agrarian class struggles in four of the five countries on which I have focused, plus Russia and the Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden – the additions enabling me to represent “Leftist” agrarian politics adequately. The missing country is Great Britain. Most stratification theories from Marx onward were based on the British experience. Table 19.1 shows how misleading this is.

We see that Britain (excluding its Irish colony) remained deviant throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1911, only 9 percent of its labor force was in agriculture, less than one-third the percentage in any other major Power (minor Power Belgium had the next lowest, at 23 percent). In the other two most advanced economies, Germany and the United States, manufacturing and mining labor forces were only just then overtaking the agricultural and this had not occurred anywhere else besides Britain and Belgium. Whereas agriculture was insignificant in early twentieth-century British class relations, this was not true elsewhere. The outcome of the struggles charted in previous chapters among capital, labor, and the middle class would be decisively altered by agrarians. To theorize about modern class relations adequately, we must analyze the agrarian populations.