• Prelims [ICAS Agrarian Change and Peasant Studies | Series Acknowledgements | Preface]
• 1 Peasants and Social Transformations
• The Political Relevance of Peasant Theory
• Peasant Agriculture and Capitalism
• What Makes Chayanov a “Genius”?
• A Proof of Pedigree
• 2 The Two Main Balances Identified by Chayanov
• The Peasant Unit of Production: No Wages, No Capital
• The Labour-Consumer Balance
• The Political Relevance of the Labour-Consumer Balance
• The Scientific Relevance of the Labour-Consumer Balance
• The Balance of Utility and Drudgery
• On “Subjective Evaluation”
• Self-Exploitation
• 3 A Wider Array of Interacting Balances
• The Balance between People and Living Nature
• The Balance of Production and Reproduction
• The Balance of Internal and External Resources
• The Balance of Autonomy and Dependence
• The Balance of Scale and Intensity (and the Emergence of Farming Styles)
• Fighting for Progress in an Adverse Environment
• By Way of Synthesis: The Peasant Farm
• A Final Note on Differentiation
• 4 The Position of Peasant Agriculture in the Wider Context
• Town-Countryside Relations
• as Mediated by Exchange Relations
• Town-Countryside Relations as Mediated by Migration
• Farming Versus the Processing and Marketing of Food
• State-Peasantry Relations
• The Balance of Agrarian Growth and Demographic Growth
• 5 Yields
• Current Mechanisms of Labour Driven Intensification
• The Significance and Reach of Labour Driven Intensification
• When Labour Driven Intensification is Blocked
• What Propels Labour Driven Intensification?
• Intensification and the Role of Agrarian Sciences
• Can Peasants Feed the World?
• 6 Repeasantization
• Processes and Expressions of Repeasantization
• Repeasantization in Western Europe: Resetting the Balances
• Back Matter [Glossary | References | Index]

Jan Douwe van der Ploeg
Jan Douwe van der Ploeg is a professor of rural sociology at Wageningen University in the Netherlands and at China Agricultural University in Beijing.