Fields, Factories, and Workshops

Fields, Factories, and Workshops is an 1899 book by the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin. It gathers essays that the author had earlier published in British periodicals such as the Nineteenth Century and the Forum between 1888 and 1890. With it, Kropotkin aimed to ground anarchism in science and in the sociological tendencies of his time, a shift from his better-known reputation as a militant of international anarchism and as a writer on Siberian geography.

The book argues for the decentralization of industry, for the potential of intensive agriculture, and for the value of small industries and local workshops. Kropotkin contends that a country should manufacture much of what it uses and grow its own food, reducing imports and exports; to that end he proposes irrigation and greenhouse cultivation. World trade would then become mainly an exchange of surpluses and shortages. The work is more persuasive than dogmatic, arranged as a series of essays supported by numerous appendices of evidence.

It was warmly received by British readers at first, and it went through many reprints in London and New York during the twentieth century, along with a revised edition edited by Colin Ward in 1974. Critics have judged its practical optimism to be excessive. Yet its ideas on local development, decentralized energy and dependence on fossil fuels have since been read as an early anticipation of later ecological concerns.