About the Book
This book provides an important set of basic materials for students of rural development. Key papers have been chosen and arranged, and the editor has provided a general introduction and passages that link the papers, alerting the student to rival theoretical interpretations and to regional parallels and contrasts.
The book’s main aim is not to say how rural development should be achieved, but to provide a basis for the analysis of the processes that make rural societies and economies what they are and substantially determine the changes that take place within them. These papers and their framework help us to understand the nature of the phenomena with which rural development has to deal, and in doing so, to begin to evaluate the interventions of agencies and planners.
The book will be of value to students of development studies, geography, agriculture and economics, and its relevance is world-wide since it draws on material throughout the developing world, particularly Asia, Latin America and Africa.
Contents
Introduction / John Harriss
2. ‘Unimodal’ and ‘bimodal’ strategies of agrarian change / B.F. Johnston and P. Kilby
• Why poor people stay poor / Michael Lipton
3. Agrarian transition and the agrarian question / T.J. Byres
4. Urban bias, rural bias, and industrialization / Stuart Corbridge
5. The differentiation of the peasantry / V.I. Lenin
• Classical discussions of capital and peasantry / Göran Djurfeldt
6. Notes on capital and peasantry / Henry Bernstein
7. Peasant economies and the development of capitalist agriculture in the Cauca Valley, Colombia / M. Taussing
8. Polarization and cyclical mobility / Teodor Shanin
9. Chayanov’s theory of peasant economy / Mark Harrison
10. Game against nature / Michael Lipton
11. Production conditions in Indian agriculture / Krishna Bharadwaj
12. Population, involution and employment in rural Java / Benjamin White
13. Peasants, proletarianization and the articulation of modes of production / C.D. Scott
14. The state and the peasantry in Tanzania / Philip Raikes
15. Taking the part of peasants / Gavin Williams
16. Towards a practical theory of agrarian transition / Mark Harrison
About the Author / Editor
John Harriss was previously Professor and Director of the Development Studies Institute, London School of Economics; and sometime Dean of the School of Development Studies at the University of East Anglia. He is a social anthropologist with long standing interests in the politics and political economy of India, where he has lived and conducted research on many occasions. He is Professor, and founding Director of the School for International Studies, Simon Fraser University; Visiting Research Professor, National University of Singapore.
