Trying to leap from a peasant society to industrial America, many Hmong ended up in poverty or on welfare.

ECONOMIST: Immigration policy

In Turkey, where a peasant society is being catapulted into the 20th century by American investment and cold-war logic, the poor go hungry and protesters get hurled out of windows.

ECONOMIST: Post-wall German fiction

The public sector expanded only in the 1950s, after a century of astonishing economic growth driven by free trade and free markets (from 1850 to 1950, average incomes multiplied eightfold, as a poor peasant society was transformed into one of the world's richest countries).

ECONOMIST: Charlemagne

Until now, contemporary Chinese film making has been identified in the West with historical peasant dramas of great visual beauty which allude only allegorically to modern-day politics or society.

ECONOMIST: Modern-day life is now the focus of the best films from China