This is a revised and expanded edition of a popular textbook on the economics of farm households in developing countries. The second edition retains the same building blocks designed to explore household decision-making in a social context. Key topics are efficiency, risk, time allocation, gender, agrarian contracts, farm size and technological change. For these and other topics, household economic behaviour represents the outcome of social interactions within the household, and market interactions outside the household. A new chapter on the environment combines exposition of economic tools not previously covered in the book with examination of household and community decision-making in relation to environmental resources.

Challenging the claim that Palestine's peasant economy progressed during the 1920s and 1930s, Amos Nadan skillfully integrates a wide variety of sources to demonstrate that the period was actually one of deterioration on both the macro (per capita) and micro levels. The economy would have most likely continued its downward spiral during the 1940s had it not been for the temporary prosperity that resulted from World War II. Nadan argues that this deterioration continued despite the British authorities' channeling of funds from the Jewish sector and the wealthier Arab sectors into projects for the Arab rural economy. The British were hoping that Palestine's peasants would not rebel if their economic conditions improved. These programs were, on the whole, defective because the British chose programs based on an assumption that the peasants were too ignorant to manage their farms wisely, instead of working with the peasants and their own institutions.

Popkin develops a model of rational peasant behavior and shows how village procedures result from the self-interested interactions of peasants. This political economy view of peasant behavior stands in contrast to the model of a distinctive peasant moral economy in which the village community is primarily responsible for ensuring the welfare of its members.

In 2007, for the first time in human history, a majority of the world’s population lived in cities. However, on a global scale, poverty overwhelmingly retains a rural face. This book assembles an unparalleled group of internationally-eminent scholars in the field of rural development and social change in order to explore historical and contemporary processes of agrarian change and transformation and their consequent impact upon the livelihoods, poverty and well-being of those who live in the countryside. The book provides a critical analysis of the extent to which rural development trajectories have in the past and are now promoting a change in rural production processes, the accumulation of rural resources, and shifts in rural politics, and the implications of such trajectories for peasant livelihoods and rural workers in an era of globalization. Peasants and Globalization thus explores continuity and change in the debate on the ‘agrarian question’, from its early formulation in the late 19th century to the continuing relevance it has in our times, including chapters from Terence Byres, Amiya Bagchi, Ellen Wood, Farshad Araghi, Henry Bernstein, Saturnino M Borras, Ray Kiely, Michael Watts and Philip McMichael. Collectively, the contributors argue that neoliberal social and economic policies have, in deepening the market imperative governing the contemporary world food system, not only failed to tackle to underlying causes of rural poverty but have indeed deepened the agrarian crisis currently confronting the livelihoods of peasant farmers and rural workers. This crisis does not go unchallenged, as rural social movements have emerged, for the first time, on a transnational scale. Confronting development policies that are unable to reduce, let alone eliminate, rural poverty, transnational rural social movements are attempting to construct a more just future for the world’s farmers and rural workers.

Challenging a hundred-year tradition that English peasants were serfs at the disposal of their lord, J.A. Raftis argues that tenants were in considerable control of the manorial regime and were able to take advantage of what most scholars have considered to be exploitive and negative aspects of the medieval agricultural economy.

This is a study of peasant-state relations and village politics as they have evolved in response to the state's attempts to control the division of the harvest and extract the state-defined surplus. To provide the reader with a clearer sense of the evolution of peasant-state relations over almost a forty-year period and to highlight the dramatic changes that have taken place since 1978,1 have divided my analysis into two parts: Chapters 2 through 7 are on Maoist China, and chapters 8 and 9 are on post-Mao China. The first part examines the state's grain policies and patterns of local politics that emerged during the highly collectivized Maoist period, when the state closed free grain markets and established the system of unified purchase and sales (tonggou tongxiao). The second part describes the new methods for the production and division of the harvest after 1978, when the government decollectivized agriculture and abolished its unified procurement program.

James C. Scott places the critical problem of the peasant household—subsistence—at the center of this study. The fear of food shortages, he argues persuasively, explains many otherwise puzzling technical, social, and moral arrangements in peasant society, such as resistance to innovation, the desire to own land even at some cost in terms of income, relationships with other people, and relationships with institutions, including the state. Once the centrality of the subsistence problem is recognized, its effects on notions of economic and political justice can also be seen. Scott draws from the history of agrarian society in lower Burma and Vietnam to show how the transformations of the colonial era systematically violated the peasants’ “moral economy” and created a situation of potential rebellion and revolution. Demonstrating keen insights into the behavior of people in other cultures and a rare ability to generalize soundly from case studies, Scott offers a different perspective on peasant behavior that will be of interest particularly to political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, and Southeast Asianists. “The book is extraordinarily original and valuable and will have a very broad appeal. I think the central thesis is correct and compelling.”—Clifford Geertz “In this major work, … Scott views peasants as political and moral actors defending their values as well as their individual security, making his book vital to an understanding of peasant politics.”—Library Journal James C. Scott is professor of political science at Yale University.