The vogue word peasant suddenly entered general usage in relation to the rural tropical world in the late 1960s. Before that we had all been content to be more specific, employing farmers, agricultural labourers and the like; and we had been under no obligation to identify whole rural populations as peasantries. Certainly, there had been some academic discussion regarding African and Asian peasants and peasantries before that date, notably by Firth, who held that peasant was ‘a broad descriptive term of an empirical kind, suitable only for demarcating rough boundaries in categorization’ (p.17) and by Fallers, who concluded that the word denotes ‘among other things, a degree of rusticity in comparison with his betters which we do not feel justified in attributing to the African villager’; but such discussion was not associated with any general attempt to differentiate rural populations by employing peasant. Even the French, who are more familiar than the British with peasants in their home country, remained quite content, for example, with cultivateur.

In this brief chapter, I try to show why the sudden and universal adoption of peasant, as a kind of synonym for countryfolk, has done so much damage to our proper comprehension of the operation of rural tropical economies. The power of single words in human affairs is, of course, astounding; as they can trigger wars and revolutions and lead to the exoduses of whole populations, we should not perhaps be surprised that the sudden switch to peasant should have had such far-reaching consequences.