In the 13th century, Teutonic Knights from northern Europe rode into the Baltic and, backed by the papacy, converted the pagan tribespeople to Christianity. The Teutonic Order, as they came to be known, viewed the inhabitants of what is today Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as benighted pagans cut off from ‘civilisation’ by swamp and forest. Western Christianity’s eastward charge against Norse and Slavic variants of paganism amounted to an all-out assault on peasant culture. 

In time the Teutonic Order evolved into the Baltic German landed class, who exhibited their wealth by the number of ‘souls’ or enslaved peasants they owned. The serfs who toiled under the Deutsch-Balten patriciate were ‘regulated and punished, indoctrinated, reduced to the status of mere labouring bodies’, writes Maryam Aslany in her groundbreaking amalgam of history and reportage, Peasants. Serfs were sold to the highest bidder in the marketplace. So primitive was the feudal manor economy in the tsarist Baltic that estate owners were allowed to retain sexual ‘right of the first night’ over a peasant girl on her wedding day. Even after serfdom was abolished in the Baltic between 1816 and 1819 (half a century before it was abolished in imperial Russia), the Baltic Germans maintained a corvée system of forced labour that was slavery in all but name. Little had really changed. In 1839, Elizabeth Rigby, a doctor’s daughter from Norwich, visited an estate in post-abolition Estonia where her sister was married to a Germanic landowner. The peasants she encountered in hovels and threshing-sheds needed a firm hand to keep them in ‘servile obedience’, Rigby reckoned. Her travel book, A Residence on the Shores of the Baltic, published in 1841, captures the inequalities of peasant life in Teutonophile Estonia at the time of Dostoevsky.

Aslany, a research associate at the African Studies Centre at the University of Oxford, is aggrieved by the continued ‘abject condition’ of peasants throughout the world. In impeccably researched pages she argues that smallholder agriculturalists (loosely, ‘peasants’) are seen by many of us as the ‘repository of everything retrograde’. They