A study of economic development in the Dominican Republic, this book argues that rigid economic structures and poor use of labour resources have created conditions that undermine the demand for labour, and maintain perpetual poverty and unemployment. Viewing the problem from a broad perspective, the author analyzes labour and credit markets, offers empirical data on agricultural yields, and examines such socioeconomic issues as the living conditions among the peasantry, the demand for immigrant Haitian labour, and migration from rural to urban areas.

The revolutionary experiences of Cantonese peasant villagers are documented in the first comprehensive analysis of rural Chinese society by foreign anthropologists since the Revolution of 1949.

Stalinism in a Russian Province reexamines the agrarian policy pillars of Stalin's 'revolution from above' initiated in 1929-30, and is the first major study of its kind since the opening of Soviet archives. Through a pioneering application of the theoretical approaches of moral and political economy to Stalin's peasant policy, Hughes reevaluates the causes and processes involved in the great political, economic and social changes in the Soviet countryside. Rather than a bipolarized conflict between state and peasant, he profiles the socially variegated response of different peasant groups to collectivization and dekulakization and argues that it was as much a process involving social conflict between peasants.