Eric Hobsbawm long heralded ‘the death of the peasantry’ as the most dramatic and far-reaching social change to mark the twentieth century, resulting from transformations in agricultural production. In his trilogy on the ‘long nineteenth century’ (from the 1780s to 1914), he argued that the peasantry as a social class were destined to fade away, a possibility that became more actual by the late twentieth century. Across Latin America the percentage of peasants halved, or almost halved, in twenty years in Colombia (1951–73), Mexico (1960–80) and Brazil (1960–80) while in the Dominican Republic (1960–81), Venezuela (1961–81) and Jamaica (1953–81) the decline was by almost two-thirds. By the 1970s there was no country in Latin America in which peasants were not a minority with the continents of sub-Saharan Africa, South and continental Southeast Asia and China standing as the only regions of the globe still essentially dominated by rural production (Hobsbawm 1987: 137, 1994: 289–91). For Hobsbawm the epochal significance of this transformation was clear.