This concise contribution to Canadian publisher Fernwood’s series in Critical Development Studies tackles peasant farming and offers a rebuttal to historical economic arguments associating small-scale production with inefficiency. As the title delineates, Tiny Engines of Abundance offers an activist audience a set of case studies that reveal small-scale agriculture as a sophisticated and bountiful ideal rather than something to be dismissively improved or industrialized following a pattern stretching back at least to the late eighteenth century. In this volume, the author, Jim Handy, expands on his significant career contributions to Guatemalan rural history, agrarian reform studies, and revolution and resistance by adding reassessments of English enclosure, Jamaican slavery and abolition, Nigeria during the Green Revolution, and the Indian state of Kerala amidst changes wrought by intensive international development models. But he begins not in the Global South or centuries past but in the contemporary Canadian prairie where he lives and where intensive grain production prompts a “vague feeling of déjà vu” (2).

Handy introduces us to the University of Saskatchewan, whose agricultural college is a hub for industrial production methods, to provide a present-day reflection on the persistent appeal of neo-Malthusian perspectives and what Deborah Fitzgerald labeled “the industrial ideal” (Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture, [2003]). Handy describes a 2021 video advertisement for an enormous swath of cleared Canadian prairie to be rented from Robert Andjelic, Saskatchewan’s largest landowner. The combination of resources and expertise (the agricultural college), the prospect of land rents to an absentee owner (Andjelic), and the unabashed enthusiasm for monoculture on cleared land (the advertisement) prompts Handy to venture into a historical itinerary through sites in which the same combination of resources, capitalism, and mindset have attempted to eradicate the small-scale agriculture standing in the way.

Handy’s first stop on this historical tour is English enclosure between 1750 and 1850. Here, we first meet Thomas Robert Malthus, as well as the rising tide of political economy (Handy makes strong use of The Economist for illustrative quotes). But we also meet defenders of small-scale agriculture, including William Cobbett and William Thomas Thornton, the latter an office mate of and influence on John Stuart Mill. Most effectively, Handy shows how Arthur Young, Secretary to the Board of Agriculture and Internal Improvement, shifted his perspective through first-hand observation from a defender of enclosure to an advocate for the dynamic resilience of peasant farming as a safeguard against poverty.

Handy next takes us to the slave gardens of mid-nineteenth-century Jamaica. The very productivity of slave gardens made English observers nervous. Especially after abolition, Handy describes a concerted effort to eliminate productive small-scale provisioning grounds to ensure a steady supply of Black wage laborers. Next, Handy turns to milpa agriculture in the Mayan highlands of Guatemala, where small-scale cultivators faced pressures similar to emancipated slaves in Jamaica to join the wage labor–based capitalist economy. In Guatemala, a history of debt bondage and vagrancy laws sought to capture Indigenous labor for large-scale coffee and sugar properties. The democratic spring of the early 1950s provided relief for peasant communities in the form of redistributive land reform, but the US-shepherded coup in 1954 and the subsequent decades of civil war and scorched earth violence eliminated these gains and increased land inequality in the country.

In chapters 5 and 6, Handy shifts to Nigeria and India, respectively, and a deeper examination of the international Green Revolution of the mid-twentieth century. In Nigeria, Handy analyzes misconceptions about overpopulation in Africa, particularly in the Sahel, as justification for interrupting smallholder agriculture through colonial and postcolonial policy. This chapter suggests continuity in the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (funded in large degree by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), which, Handy argues, undervalues the history of innovation in West African polycropping, detailed through a case study of the Kofyar of eastern Nigeria. The book concludes with a chapter on the South Indian state of Kerala. The so-called Kerala model of development, which emphasized quality-of-life metrics achieved through government reforms without significant economic growth, has fallen out of favor and appears flawed in light of contemporary poverty statistics and farmer suicides. But these failures, Handy contends, are not attributable to the reform process per se, but rather to the persistence of large-scale plantations and a Green Revolution-esque emphasis on capital-intensive farming that displaced the productivity and multicropping of hut dwellers’ house gardens (and significantly increased debt). The chapter ends with some hopeful notes about the resilience of agricultural alternatives to the industrial model and a growing revival of organic, small-scale farming in Kerala.

Fernwood’s Critical Development Studies series is specifically geared toward offering small, interdisciplinary books for activist readers while maintaining academic rigor. As such, there are plenty of opportunities here for business history scholars to declare the analysis inadequate or insufficient. This comes with the territory. The case studies are obviously cherry-picked to showcase the dynamism of distinct cultural traditions of peasant agriculture and the tragedy of their demise. Even in this curated and brief global tour, Handy provides useful details and insightful orientations to the case studies. For academic historians, the book is perhaps most valuable not for its synthetic whole but for these chapters that offer quick overviews of important comparative cases and, for graduate students, for its accessible notes on the scholarly literature.