No other continent at present is so closely identified with smallholding peasant farming as Africa. The centrality of peasants in both the academic and policy-oriented literature on Africa belies the marginality of African peasants in the terms that really matter, namely their capability to achieve self-destiny. This chapter could have been aptly titled, ‘African Peasants in the World Economy: Make or Break’, for the conscious creation and the ongoing, seemingly unintentional dissolution of African peasantries within global trade networks has been compressed into hardly more than a century. For most of recorded history, Africa has been a relatively sparsely populated continent. Labor has been at a premium, while land has been plentiful. The appearance and disappearance of peasantries in this context has to be related to demographic as well as economic and political factors. This chapter provides historical background to the pre-colonial period, before schematically tracing the emergence of African peasantries under European colonialism, their consolidation amidst decolonization and early independent government, and finally the circumstances undermining their existence from the mid-1970s onwards.

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