This chapter addresses the central question of this book: how, in Europe during the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, processes of nation-building led to the “rediscovery” of the peasant by political, cultural, and academic elites. In this period, the peasant became the epicenter of political reform and social research, as a heavily ideologized subject to be “examined” and “mapped.” It considers how national elites in Central and Eastern Europe recast the peasantry in the process of building the modern state, and how political integration transformed peasants from subjects into active citizens. Between the 1870s and the 1970s, a series of political (national) and economic (productivist and commercial) revolutions remade rural worlds in Europe and across the globe. By the second half of the twentieth century, governments and agribusiness had definitively transformed the global countryside as part of national polities and global capitalism. The central argument is that the politicization of rural worlds promoted peasant participation in public affairs and, in this way, became a central driver of societal modernization.