Conclusion to
The Power of Peasants

The findings of this book can be summarized as follows:

1. Rome’s rise was powered by the productivity and combativity of its free farmers.
2. Rome’s decline was caused by the destruction of its free farmers by its slaveholders, emperors, tax collectors, and army commanders.
3. In northern Europe, free barbarians developed a more productive agriculture, with which they produced more food, more farmers, more warriors, until they overran the empire.
4. The early medieval period was a brawl over whether slavery would survive. The farmers half-won, abolishing slavery, but were held in serfdom.
5. Charlemagne tried to create a new empire, based in northern Europe, but more advances in agricultural production by this now-freer peasantry fed the rise of an aristocracy independent of the emperor that overthrew this empire as well and opened the road to the rise of feudalism.
6. Europe’s medieval economic takeoff began on the farms in those regions where the farmers first and most completely conquered their freedom: northern Italy, Flanders, and England, opening the way for farmers to develop an agricultural revolution. The great surpluses these farmers produced fueled the rise of a merchant class and cities, where craftspeople made an industrial revolution, further spurring growth. This fight for freedom by the farmers and new townspeople spread across the continent.
7. From this expansion, the papacy and the German aristocracy grew wealthy, allied with each other, and in a bitter civil war broke the power of the king, blocking Germany from uniting under a national monarchy.
8. By 1250, the new masters of society, the feudal lords, had tightened their grip on the peasantry. This caused declining agricultural yields, malnutrition, the spread of the bubonic plague, and the Hundred Years War.
9. This infighting among the feudal lords weakened them, allowing the peasants to regain some freedom and begin rebuilding.
10. In a running fight over whether land and labor would be freed from serfdom, the feudal lords defeated the farmers, urban workers, and merchants in Germany in a series of wars in 1389, 1440–60, and finally in the Peasant War of 1525.
11. The feudal lords then tightened the shackles of serfdom and raised rents to the point of breaking the back of the economy. This blocked Germany’s transition to capitalism and guaranteed its decay into widespread malnutrition, famine, plague, witch hunts, the Thirty Years War, and another 300 years of feudal stagnation.
12. Meanwhile, farmers in Holland and England fought their way out of serfdom and continued to increase agricultural production, which powered the growth of commerce and cities. Strong farmer and merchant classes—and the beginnings of a working class—developed that allied and destroyed the remnants of feudalism and launched these countries to world power.
13. The last part of this book responds to claims that the twists and turns of history were caused by the weather, overpopulation, sunspots, property rights for the rich, and so forth.