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Book reviewsE. J. Hobsbawm a , Ian Carter b , MichaelWilliams c , T. V. Sathyamurthy d & PervaizNazir ea Birkbeck College , University of London ,b University of Aberdeen ,c Londond University of York ,e University of Warwick ,Published online: 05 Feb 2008.

To cite this article: E. J. Hobsbawm , Ian Carter , Michael Williams , T. V.Sathyamurthy & Pervaiz Nazir (1978) Book reviews, The Journal of PeasantStudies, 5:2, 254-265

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BookReviews

E.J. Hobsbawm*Peasants, Politics and Revolution: Pressures toward Political and Social

Change in the Third World, by Joel S. Migdal. Princeton, 1974. Pp. 300.

Joel Migdal's important book, though using some fieldwork in India and Mexico, essen-tially synthesises fifty-one available community studies and other printed work. Negatively,it is an argument against the more simple-minded 'modernisation' theory. Positively, itargues in favour of the Chinese and Vietnamese type of peasant revolution, which it seesas successful because the revolutionaries were capable, not so much of outfighting as ofout-administering the government (p. 262). This argument for the pre-revolutionaryMao against the pre-revolutionary Lenin (pp. 255-56) is interesting, but does not throwmuch light on the many cases where revolutionaries have failed to build a decisive massbase or an alternative government among the peasantry, or on the special conditions whichmade victory possible for some who did, though war is briefly referred to. Its relevanceto the future prospects of revolution is uncertain, though the author is surely right, againstboth specialists in insurgency and counter-insurgency, to stress the building and involve-ment in movements rather than the conditions leading to 'sudden eruptions'. His argumentmay not apply only to peasants.

However, if there are doubts about Migdal's purpose, as well as about the slightlycavalier reduction of world economic change to 'the world-wide imperialism of the eigh-teenth and nineteenth centuries' (p. 91), they do not diminish the great value of his modelof the transformation of peasant communities, world economic change being assumed asgiven. It may be summarised as follows.

Most traditional peasant communities are dominated by the threat of nature, i.e.periodic dearth, and man, i.e. lords, state or other outsiders likely to exploit and bringinsecurity to peasants. Since these dangers are uncontrollable, the optimal strategy forpeasants is to cut themselves off so far as possible from the outside world, to control theirenvironment (and notably their household) as far as possible in order to minimise certainrisks rather than to maximise possible gains, which are in any case unlikely to accrue tothe many 'already hovering near the brink of survival'. This rational strategy, rather thanculture or psychology, explains why 'traditional* peasantries, though almost alwaysmarginally involved with cash and market relations, are sceptical of offered innovations,even when these seem clearly to be to their advantage. The odds are that the potentialrisks are greater than the potential gains.

Such withdrawal is always threatened by the minority of those able to accumulatesufficient resources, for whom the benefits of participation in the larger system outweighthe risks, those already involved in one way or another and who—since communities arenot homogeneous and egalitarian—might thereby gain in status and power. In traditionalsystems these are kept in check by the strength of village social organisation and conven-tion, perhaps reinforced by the interest of lords (where they exist). In a context of generaleconomic development the potentially innovating and disruptive groups are strengthenedin two ways: by their own growing importance, and by the crisis in the village economylikely to ensue when the highly inflexible balance between peasant income and peasantexpenditure under conditions of fixed technology is disturbed, i.e. by the growth ofpoverty which forces the poor also to look outward. Where land is limited and the attemptto control and optimise household size breaks down, the crisis becomes more acute,though Migdal does not deal at length with the conditions in which land shortage develops,

*Birkbeck College, University of London.

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Book Reviews 255

or the consequent breakdown of, for example, the regulation of family size. His discussionof demographic growth is cursory.

Such crises (or the weakening of lordship, often associated with them) diminish theeffectiveness of the social mechanisms for restraint against outside involvement, thoughnot the demand of the poor for co-operative and collective institutions to cope with theproblems of an individualistic society (or, we may add, the advantages of controllingcommunal institutions for the relatively rich). However, it is those least affected by thecrisis who are the first to use the opportunities to establish new outside ties. Social differ-entiation in the village grows and becomes more rigid. Where such safety valves as frontiersettlement, short-term seasonal wage-labour, long-term out-migration and so on are notavailable to relieve the stress and allow the old village pattern to survive, it disintegrates.The village can no longer withdraw. 'The centre of village life has shifted from the villagesquare to the national capital' or the international commodity markets. Migdal's generalmodel, ably—though not exhaustively—elaborated in his book, is undoubtedly bothpowerful and valuable.

Since his interests are primarily political, he is chiefly concerned with the tensionsarising out of the failure of this transformed village to integrate into the larger community,which is increasingly essential to it, both economically and, for example, through theincreasing use of law courts, police etc. Hence he insists mainly on the difficulties arisingout of shortcomings in the larger network, 'marked by corruption and monopolisticpractices and . . . structurally incomplete'. In short, the economic pay-off of the newmarket society depends on institutions and infrastructures which are not automaticallygenerated by the market-incentive, i.e. it depends upon bargaining with and pressureupon (generally sluggish and inefficient) outside authorities. Peasants enter politics whenthey discover (following upon organisation by outsiders) that they can get specific materialadvantages in exchange for some action, e.g. roads for votes, 'trade-offs that overcomesome of the shortages of the institutional network'. Revolutions of the Chinese-Vietnamesetype are the extreme form of this entry into politics. 'Peasants have been forced into anew social and economic world, but that world does not meet their needs. They are con-stantly confronted by the corruption, monopoly and structural incompleteness of theoutside institutional network. It is to these problems that revolutionaries must addressthemselves', and through these that peasants acquire a sense of the goals of a nationwiderevolution.

Here, as elsewhere, Migdal thinks too much about the Third World, where admittedlythe role of state and authorities is crucial, and its impact often sudden, arbitrary and bothinefficient and corrupt. Indeed his model appears to assume that the Third World peasan-try is not merely a more extreme form of any peasantry, but in some ways sui generis. Thishas not been established and is not certain. He therefore neglects other options for whichagriculture in the now developed countries provides precedents: a relatively smooth inte-gration of peasants into the new economy (as perhaps in Denmark), the acquisition ofsufficient political muscle to defend their interests effectively (as for a long time in Franceand the USA), or even peasant mobilisation by socially radical movements—includingthe creation of independent institutional networks—but which remain integrated in afunctioning capitalist economy (as perhaps in Tuscany or the populist Midwest). In asense the really dramatic decline of the peasantry, in the form of mass emigration whichvirtually empties the countryside, is a global phenomenon. It has taken place simulta-neously in developed and underdeveloped countries since the 1950s. It is at least arguablethat, allowing for the difference between richer and poorer countries, the causes aresimilar.

A further query arises out of Migdal's tendency to continue using the term 'peasantry'for the new complex, socially differentiated and stratified rural population. If indeed, ashe suggests, village consensus breaks down, and the struggles of villagers are directedinwards against each other (e.g. landless against landed) rather than outwards (e.g. againstlatifundists, bankers, cities or the state), the basis of movements which can reintegratethe village or the peasantry as such within a wider system may cease to exist. Or rather, asWolf has suggested, it may only exist in so far as the traditional 'middle peasant' still

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survives as the core of agrarian society. At a certain stage movements may be able toorganise the landless only at the cost of antagonising landholding peasants, or the otherway round. It may even happen—though probably not for some time in the areas withwhich Migdal is concerned—that we can no longer speak of a 'peasantry' at all.

A final doubt concerns the author's insistence on political mobilisation 'in return formaterial inducements that are offered to individuals or families seeking to solve theireconomic crises' (p. 21). Though no peasant, and especially no poor peasant, can affordto neglect material interest, neither peasant politics nor any other politics can be sub-sumed under this exclusive heading. It is as implausible to consider the mutual Hindu-Muslim massacres in India during partition only as something which enabled some peasantsto gain additional resources by driving others out of the village (p. 119), as it is to denythat the Mexican Cristeros believed themselves to be fighting for Christ the King, orProvencal villagers in 1851 for the Republic. Even peasants have ideology, though it isnot surprising that it pays adequate attention to the right to land and good farm-prices.

Nevertheless such criticisms do not diminish the value of a book from which the presentreviewer, at least, has gained much illumination and even more stimulation.

Ian Carter*The Making of the Crofting Community by J. Hunter. Edinburgh: John

Donald, 1976. Pp. xiv+309; £10-00.

The agrarian history of the Scottish highlands has been an intellectual battleground formore than a century. Combat has always centred around the (in)famous Highland clear-ances: was the large-scale eviction of peasants in the interests of establishing extensivesheep farms simply the inevitable consequence of modernising Highland agriculture, orwas it a ruthless exploitation of those who had made the land by lairds capriciously abro-gating customary conceptions of land ownership and tenure ? Today, as in the nineteenthcentury, commentators gravitate inexorably to one or other of these poles of argument.Contemporary commentators were quite open in their partisanship. Lairds like the Dukeof Argyll and their agents—James Loch, the factor of the notorious Sutherland estate, isthe most notable example—gave bland and blanket justifications of the clearances thatrested on the assumption that the Highland laird, like the owner of any private property,was not to be expected to do other than maximise the profits that he drew from it. Critics,both those like Donald Macleod who had himself been cleared from Sutherland underJames Loch's factorship, and outsiders like Marx and Sismondi, rested their denunciationof lairdly policy on the assumption that—morally if not legally—the clan and not the chiefhad held the land and thus that the clearance of tenants by the laird was a scandalousabrogation of customary expectations. These positions have been repeated in the presentcentury. Economic historians, working from estate papers, have exculpated landlords toa greater or lesser degree: sometimes, as with Philip Gaskell's study of Morvern, anallegedly neutral study becomes an open hymn of praise to the clearing landlords. Thosewho have taken the opposite line, notably John Prebble and Ian Grimble, have beencastigated by the Scottish academic establishment—never a very open-minded lot—asrabble-rousers. And interesting as is Prebble's work, in particular, it is true that he takestoo many myths for truth.

A yawning gulf has for years been evident: the need for a careful agrarian history of theHighlands as seen through the window of a crofter's black house rather than from thewindows of Dunrobin Castle. That gulf has now been filled, brilliantly, by James Hunter'simportant book. He takes on the usual pro-landlord line directly, and demolishes it. Andyet, curiously, although this book has been very widely reviewed in Scotland, its argumenthas yet to receive an answer from any of those historians who, hitherto, were so sure of theTightness of the landlords' case. Perhaps they are abashed by the fact that Hunter is thefirst modern Gaelic-speaking historian to tackle the history of the expropriation of a

* University of Aberdeen.

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Gaelic-speaking peasantry. It helps to be able to understand what people were saying.Hunter's approach is very subtle. John Prebble's denunciation of landlordly politics in

the Highlands rests on an imperialist theory. Highland history, he says, is the history ofthe development of strategies by the British government which later would be appliedin other colonial areas. It is an interesting idea with more than a grain of truth, but aca-demic historians replied that one did not need such a disgracefully political theory:Highland lairds were merely acting rationally in seeking to modernise their estates, andthe clearances were the inevitable result. Hunter takes them at their word, but shows thatlairds' actions were rational only within the frame of the private pursuit of profit. His is atheory not of imperialism but of agrarian capitalism.

The book has two parts. In the first part Hunter examines the establishment of agrariancapitalism in the Highlands. He shows that, contrary to lay opinion and much officialopinion today, crofting is not a 'traditional' arrangement. The typical crofting landscapeof poor peasants subsisting, or failing to subsist, on individually tenanted dwarf arableholdings plus a right to share in township common grazings was deliberately created inthe eighteenth century. The origin of crofting lies in the development of commerciallandlordism, the determination of Highland lairds from the eighteenth century to squeezethe maximum amount of surplus from their estates. To this end they destroyed the priorcommunally organised runrig farms and allocated consolidated dwarf holdings to theirformer inhabitants. The holdings intentionally were made too small to sustain the croftinghousehold in order to force crofters and their families into industrial production—notablykelp-burning and fishing—any income from, which the laird could cream as rent. At thistime—the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—lairds resolutely resisted emi-gration, since the larger the crofting population the greater the profits to be drawn fromkelp and fish. Things changed in the nineteenth century, however. A catastrophic collapsein the price of kelp, plus the rising profitability of sheep and wool made high populationlevels embarrassing to lairds, particularly when the main subsistence crop—the potato—failed in the late eighteen-forties. Greater profits could now be made by letting the land toextensive graziers. Hence the clearances: tenants were removed from their existing holdingsand pushed on to barren moor and rocky outcrops, herded into overcrowded coastaltownships where their industrial production could still be creamed as rent while leavingtheir former holdings to the grazier. Many were forced to emigrate, either to the coloniesor to Clydeside.

Much of the material in this part of the book is not new. Hunter does demonstratethat clearances were much more widespread than had hitherto been thought, touchingas they did almost every part of the west Highlands and Islands. But the general storyalready existed in the work of Malcolm Gray on the establishment and consolidation ofcrofting. What Hunter has done is to put that story in the framework of agrarian capitalistdevelopment, and to use it as a backcloth against which to throw the second, novel, partof his story—the tale of the fight back by crofters.

This section of the book is fascinating. Hunter shows in meticulous detail how sporadicopposition to clearance slowly gelled into a class-conscious political movement aimed atachieving security and heritability of tenure—not peasant proprietorship—for crofters,and at getting more land for peasant cultivation. He emphasises the difficulties presentedto this consciousness-raising process by ideological residues from clanship, and the wayin which these difficulties largely were overcome through adherence to the evangelicalFree Church of Scotland and, more particularly, through the emergence of 'the men'—a lay preacher leadership coming out of the crofting class that would provide an organisa-tional model for land agitation in the 1880s. He shows how, in the 1880s, agitation wassuccessfully canalised on contemporary Irish lines—notably through rent strikes—until,in 1886, Gladstone's government gave crofters security and heritability of tenure underpressure from lawless crofters in the Highlands and from the members of the crofters' ownpolitical party in Parliament. That did not solve all the Highland peasantry's problems,however. Land hunger remained, particularly among the landless cottars who squattedas crofters' unofficial subtenants: it took another four decades of agitation and directaction—land raids—until this land hunger was assuaged. By this time the effects of the

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clearances had been totally reversed in the west Highlands: over large areas every capitalistfarm had been broken up and reassigned to peasant tenants. The crofters and cottars hadwon.

The Making of the Crofting Community is a remarkable book, the more so when onerealises its origin in a doctoral thesis. It is not without minor flaws. This reviewer wouldhave liked some kind of statistical analysis of the agrarian structure of the Highlands—evidence for which is available in the parish totals of the Board of Agriculture from the1860s—against which to set the qualitative evidence upon which Hunter relies so heavily.Again, as a Gael, Hunter is most interested in the west Highlands and the Hebrides.Nothing wrong in that, given the riches with which he provides us. But Caithness isscarcely mentioned in the book, and yet land agitation in Caithness predated the 1882Skye agitation with which Hunter opens his account of the Highland Land War. Had hepaid more attention to non-Gaelic areas of the Highlands Hunter would, I am sure, havefound that important influences on the crofters' political organisation—the HighlandLand Law Reform Association—came from eastern lowland Scotland as well as fromIreland. He might with advantage also have been rather less timid about exposing to thelight of day the class analysis which underpins the book.

But these are minor points. This book already is a minor classic and in future yearswill be seen, like E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class from whichits title is derived, to have been one of those books that alters the intellectual landscape ofan entire discipline. For a reader interested in peasant studies Hunter's account of theincorporation of a poor peasantry within agrarian capitalism, and that peasantry's subse-quent successful guerilla war against their exploiters, will hold many lessons and insights—paralleling, as it does, what is happening today in many parts of the third world. A veryimportant book then: but what a comment on current British academic life that a manwhose doctoral thesis has remade nineteenth-century Scottish agrarian history has beenunable to get a job in a Scottish university.

Michael Williams*The Myth of the Lazy Native. A study of the image of the Malays, Filipinos

and Javanese from the sixteenth to the twentieth century and its functionin the ideology of colonial capitalism, by S. H. Alatas. Frank Cass,London, 1977. Pp. 267.

This book, billed on its cover as 'a profound and wide-ranging exploration of the notionof the "lazy native",' is a disappointing, poorly written mixture of ill-absorbed leftism andstatements of the obvious, which has little to recommend itself either to readers of thisjournal, or to South-East Asia specialists. Professor Alatas, who is Head of the Departmentof Malay Studies at the University of Singapore, starts from the rather manifest pointthat the effects of capitalism in the colonial world contributed to their underdevelopment.Another of his basic arguments is that the vast majority of writers on South-East Asiaduring the colonial period were little more than ideologues and apologists for imperialism.With this no one will argue and it is what gives the book an air of unreality. ProfessorAlatas's enemies packed up bags and returned home more than a quarter of a century ago.Even in the most reactionary of circles the views which he attacks find no proponents now.

The author tackles the colonial viewpoint that the Malays, Javanese and Filipinos wereindolent by starting from the shaky premise that imperialism not only destroyed thenative trading class, but that had this not occurred, 'by the end of the nineteenth centurythere would have been Malay and Javanese trading houses in the West. There wouldhave been an independent, influential trading class in Indonesia and Malaya and possiblyin the Philippines . . . The mining class ( ?) instead of disappearing under British rule . . .would inevitably have acquired modern mining technology' (p. 21). There was, of course,nothing inevitable about such historical development. Banten in West Java, one of the

*London.

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most successful and prosperous of the coastal trading states in seventeenth-century South-East Asia, owed its position essentially to its monopoly of the pepper trade. The merchantcapital present there was entirely in the hands of Chinese and Indians and was not indige-nous. This was also the case in many other South-East Asian trading states. They wereentrepots with no control over their own hinterlands. The author fails to see the elementarydistinction, repeatedly emphasised by Marx, between merchant capital and capitalism asa mode of production. This leads him to the most fantastic assertions: 'monopoly capital-ism, which Lenin considered as the highest stage of capitalism leading to the scramblefor empire, was operative in this region by the seventeenth century'; and again 'financecapitalism was operative in Indonesia long before it dominated Western society' (p. 6).

Where the author is on firmer ground is in his analysis of why the Malay and Javanesepeasantry were reluctant to provide labour on Western plantations or to engage in com-modity production. This presented the British and the Dutch with grave difficulties. TheDutch found the answer on Java by the introduction of the Cultuurstelsel (CultivationSystem) in 1830 which forced the peasantry of Java to grow commodity crops such as tea,coffee, tobacco and sugar on one-fifth of their lands. By the time this system was abolishedat the end of the nineteenth century, population pressure and landlessness were suchthat there was no shortage of peasants to work on the plantations. Malaya was anotherproblem. The peninsula was sparsely populated, there was no land shortage and thepeasantry were, until the twentieth century, largely subsistence producers. However, theauthor barely touches on these sound socio-economic reasons why the Malay peasantryremained outside the colonial economy. The owners of the British tin mines and rubberplantations were therefore forced to look elsewhere for labour. This they found in Chinaand India. The Malay peasantry remained peripheral to British exploitation of the Malayaneconomy and were to many observers an unknown quantity. As one early English visitornoted, 'it is almost impossible to say how one-twentieth part of the Malay populationoccupies itself'.1 This was the basis of the British view of the Malay peasant as indolent.

Alatas cites examples of similar views expressed by Dutch and Spanish writers about theJavanese and Filipino peasantry, but there is little analysis of the reasons for this deni-gration of the 'native' other than the trite conclusion that the observers were apologistsfor Western imperialism. The author proceeds at great length to discuss the iniquities ofthe British encouragement of opium smoking and toddy drinking in Malaya, but as theseaffected only Chinese and Indian plantation labour and hardly touched the Malay peasan-try, the reader is left wondering what is the relevance to the topic under discussion.Similarly, the author digresses on the subject of slavery and comes to the remarkableconclusion that the 'degree of slavery was proportionate to the degree of European controlof the area' (p. 212). Slavery, however, was just as prevalent, if not more so, in pre-colonial South-East Asian societies. The colonial regimes adopted other mechanisms forthe extraction of surplus from the economy.

The most interesting chapter is that dealing with the image of the Malays held by thepresent governing party of Malaysia, UMNO (the United Malay National Organisation).As the author shows, this is essentially the same image as that held by the former colonialpower:

The unique factor about the UMNO ideology is the strong element of self degrada-tion. Historically speaking, the ideologies of ruling classes the world over contain astrong element of self assertion, of pride of the group and its achievements. Not sowith the UMNO ideology. The self-reproach and self-degradation reflect their ownposition in the economic set-up inherited from colonial capitalism. They feel inferiorbecause the criteria of measurement are derived from colonial capitalism, (p. 153)

Despite Alatas's recognition of this, however, we are provided with no explanation asto why there is no break in the ideological consciousness of Malayan society held by the

NOTE1 J. Thomson, The Straits of Malacca, Indochina and China, Low, Marston and Searle,

London, 1875, p. 33, cited by Alatas p. 73.

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260 The Journal of Peasant Studies

colonial power and the post-colonial political elite. Lamentably, too, the structural reasonsfor the alleged 'indolence' of the Malay and Javanese peasantry under the colonial regimeare hardly examined.

T. V. Sathyamurthy*Woman-Work: Women and the Party in Revolutionary China, by Delia

Davin. Oxford: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1976.Pp. x+244. £5.95.

This is the first systematic study of the role of the Chinese Communist Party in trans-forming the position of women in Chinese society. Although the question of the positionof women had figured in earlier Chinese social and political movements (especially theTaiping Movement), it was during the Chinese Revolution that women's rights weretreated as an integral part of the revolutionary process. Throughout the century precedingthe revolution, China had been exposed to foreign cultural influences, but these scarcelypenetrated beyond the coastal areas. In the matter of women's emancipation and freedom,the hinterland was thus insulated from foreign influences to which Chinese women in thecoastal cities, and especially those belonging to the middle class, had been exposed throughtheir education and participation in such mass actions as anti-imperialist demonstrations.During the first decade of Kuomintang rule over China, women's rights were included inthe political programme of the party, and even found their way into the Civil Code of1931. But the KMT, despite the fact that it had a separate women's section, repressed theradical leadership of the women's movement and ignored 'wider feminist goals'.

It was the CCP which gave a consistently prominent place to the women's movementand incorporated 'woman-work' (a Chinese term adopted by Delia Davin to cover 'all sortsof activities among women, including mobilising them for revolutionary struggle, pro-duction, literacy and hygiene campaigns, social reform, and so on.'—p. 17) into partywork from the very earliest period of its existence. Many women workers and studentscame to the fore during the early 'twenties as party cadres who organised women's leaguesto fight for women's rights in rural communities, thus making sure that wherever thecommunists went (e.g. the Northern Expedition, 1924-25)—whether during the UnitedFront period or during subsequent years—women's struggle would be waged as an integralpart of the class struggle. With the progress of the revolution in different parts of China(especially since the period of the Jiangxi Soviet), the narrowly feminist tendency whichconcentrated on women's struggle in the belief that true equality was possible without asocial revolution was overcome by the socialist tendency in the women's movement 'whichheld that women's liberation would only be achieved under socialism'.

Delia Davin has studied the development of the socialist tendency in the women'srights movement spearheaded by the Chinese Revolution. Though her historical focus isthe entire period since the formation of the party, she has taken pains to stress the contri-butions of the earlier feminists—those intrepid women who emerged as indefatigablepolitical and cultural workers occupied with the problems of women during the 'twentiesand who had been students during the 4th May Movement (1919). It is somewhat dis-appointing that, in an otherwise excellent work, the curiously assertive passage quotedbelow is not developed elsewhere in the book from the specific perspective of what toDelia Davin is the dominant role of women intellectuals in the alliance between them andthe mass of women:

Even today, many of the important leaders of the women's movement are womenwho were students in the 4th May movement, and women intellectuals have playedan important part in mobilising peasant and worker women throughout the revolu-tion. Without the struggle of the earlier feminists there would have been no womenintellectuals and the alliance envisaged by Xiang Jingyu between them and thelabouring women would never have taken place (p. 18).

*University of York.

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Delia Davin's study concentrates on the 'fifties. But, in order to write intelligibly aboutthe 'fifties a more than cursory examination of the previous period is essential j and inorder to place the developments of the 'fifties in broader perspective, the changes thatoccurred during the subsequent decade (especially as it was the time of the CulturalRevolution) must be discussed in some detail. In this study the chapter on the history ofthe Women's Federation since 1949 is preceded by a chapter which carries a condensedaccount of the policy of the CCP to women in the Jiangxi Soviet and the liberated areas.In the last two chapters, which deal with women in the countryside and women in thetowns in revolutionary China, the developments of the 'sixties are related to the achieve-ments and problems of the 'fifties. The core of the book revolves round the theme that therevolutionising of the role of women in society was, and in some respects, still is attendedby practical difficulties (e.g. basic institutional factors inhibiting the implementation of the1949 Marriage Law especially in the 'conservative countryside').

During the Jiangxi Soviet period, 'woman-work' was a subject of much controversy,and Delia Davin points out that different regions and different organisations put forwarda number of programmes, plans, and lists of action. However, all agreed that the greatestimportance should be given to organising women for the war effort. The development ofthis general theme is interwoven in Delia Davin's account with a discussion of the LandLaws, Marriage Law and the Labour Law of the Jiangxi Soviet as they affected women.A number of factors contributed to the growing economic, social and political role ofwomen in the Soviet. Revolutionary ideology was applied, by and large, in a sensitivemanner in the matter of propagating the idea of equality of sexes among a predominantlyrural population. With the departure of large numbers of men for the war front, theproportion of women representatives at district congresses increased and this developmenttended to give new momentum to the women's rights movement within the Soviet. InShaanxi, after the Long March, the fully fledged new Soviet was compelled to apply itspolicy on women's rights to a more backward population. The party's emphasis on pro-duction, with a view to focusing upon the economic aspect of women's rights as the mostfundamental, clashed with the more all-encompassing approach urged by militant womenintellectuals who occupied positions of importance in the movement. In the inner-partycontroversy surrounding the ideas of the woman leader Ding Ling on 'full sex equality',the view that prevailed placed emphasis on the need for great caution in dealing with theentrenched institution of family and on approaching the overall problem of women's rightsand role by seeking to raise women's morale and consciousness by the production move-ment and Land Reform. Delia Davin provides a balanced account in which the point ismade that the progress from economic equality to 'free choice' marriage was in generaleasily accomplished. By 1948, women in China had already 'started on the road to completeliberation'.

The work of the Women's movement continued after the revolution through separateorganisations for women. The strength of these organisations varied from region to region.In the 1948 Central Committee resolutions, 'paper organisations' in certain areas claimingto be involved in 'woman-work' were roundly condemned. After the revolution, theWomen's Federation was set up. It gave women's organisations 'a national leadership,voice and cohesion'. Delia Davin draws attention to some of the persistent problems facedby the women's movement during the post-1949 period. For example, the existence of un-employment was directly related to the setting up of dependents' associations which werein fact women's organisations. The change of emphasis in party propaganda from women'sright to productive labour before 1957 to building up the country economically andmanaging the household thriftily after 1957, and the criticism of the latter during theCultural Revolution, is explained rather feebly (pp. 67-68) on the basis that 'the periodsof radicalism and comparative conservatism in the women's movement can be quiteclearly related to periods of radical or conservative economic policy'. This is one of severalexamples in the book of the gap between the richness and soundness of description andempirical substantiation on the one hand and on the other weak and tentative analyticexplanation. We shall indicate the methodological reason for this after a brief review ofthe second half of the book.

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262 ' The Journal of Peasant Studies

The chapters on 'Marriage and the Family' and 'Women in the Countryside' are by farthe best in the book. Together they constitute a richly textured account of the evolutionof the Chinese family and the changing role of the Chinese woman in agricultural pro-duction. In these two chapters, Delia Davin is very much more at home with Westernacademic studies of Chinese sociology and economic history (see, e.g., pp. 70-83; pp. 115-25) than Chinese revolutionary writings—more specifically their underlying Marxist-Leninist framework—despite the fact that she is equally knowledgeable about both. Thiscan be explained by a strong built-in resistance of the liberal intellect to swimming indialectical waters. Thus, after discussing the difficulties encountered by the regime inimplementing The Marriage Law (1949), which, from her own account, would appear tohave been formidable (e.g. see p. 97 for an extreme example, and pp. 107 ff. and pp. 113 ff.for a more general indication), Delia Davin's conclusion is that the implementation of TheMarriage Law 'betrays more caution about probable public reaction than concern forrealism' (p. 90). Again, one wonders why the perfectly reasonable and serious explanationin the official literature that 'when young people start to make their own decisions afterthousands of years of feudalism, it is quite likely that they will not be very good at it atfirst' (pp. 101-02) should be dismissed as quaintness. However, the balance sheet drawnup by the author leaves one in no doubt that socialist construction in China has placedconsiderable emphasis on 'woman-work'; at the same time, it should be remembered thatcomplex general socio-economic problems inherited from the past cannot be wished away.The failure of the author to come to grips with the great importance attached by the Chi-nese to the manifold problems relating to the necessarily long transition of socialist con-struction, from the success of the proletarian revolution to the achievement of communism(of which fast-vanishing glimmers can be caught by the wary reader on pages 163 and181), places strict limits on her ability to interpret her material.

On the question of the change of status of women in the countryside, Delia Davin startsby pointing out that even in traditional society women were not totally excluded from pro-ductive work though their share of the total burden of work (much of which centred roundthe family rather than the field) was formidable. In her account of the changes introducedby revolution in rural 'woman-work', the author stresses the continuous and gradualnature of the mobilisation. The campaign at district, county, provincial, and nationallevels to elect women 'labour models'; the emergence of poor peasant women (because oftheir skill in agricultural work) as women leaders in the 1956-57 campaign to establishagricultural co-operatives all over China ('High Tide of Socialism'); the impact of LandReform on the real revolution in the position of women in rural China liberated after 1945which was manifested by the importance they were given in Peasant Associations; theelaboration of the term 'feudal tendency' to include the traditional attitude of the poorerpeasant to his wife or to women in general; and the practical difficulties involved inevaluating jobs and allocating 'work points' on the basis of'labour days' in order to ensurethat the principle of 'equal pay for equal work' is followed as rigorously as possible—areillustrated with well-chosen examples. While mixed work teams in collective agriculturehad certain obvious advantages over all-women work teams, the latter were more approp-riate for making certain that special requirements would be met:

When pregnant, they must be given light work not heavyWhen nursing, work must be close-by not far awayDuring their periods, their work must be dry not wet. (quoted on p. 147.)

'Women in the Towns' is the least satisfactory chapter of the book. Unlike the others, itfails to generate an overall picture of how 'woman-work' in modern/urban China hasdeveloped since the revolution. The main features touched upon include the persistenceof unemployment during the fifties, the boost given to the self-confidence of womencadres and workers through such means as highlighting, for example, the achievementsof the women steelworkers of Anshan and women railway workers (for no stated reason,pejoratively referred to as 'publicity stunts'—p. 179—in the book!). In the earlier part ofthe chapter, the failure of the organisations systematically to denigrate housework is high-lighted as undesirable, to the accompaniment of invoking Lenin to the author's aid. One

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can have no disagreement with the underlying sentiment. But, a few pages later, thepractice of well-to-do families employing women servants is referred to with apparentapproval and the criticism of this during the Cultural Revolution, generally regarded inthe book as having served the cause of women well, is met by the revealing argument that'it was equally true that such privileges made it easier for women in senior positions to getpromoted and to pursue their power'. This ambivalence in judging the effects of therevolution on the status of women, which stems from the author's tendency to dismissthe CCP's insistence that the women's struggle should not be and could not be separatefrom the class struggle as orthodoxy, pervades the whole book. The reason for this mustbe sought in the overall unstated orientation of the work and the method used by the authorto tackle her material.

The material used in writing this book has greater analytic potential than has beenexploited by the author. In order to appreciate the full significance of the struggles thathave been waged in China since the revolution, it is not enough to draw up balance sheetsand to praise with qualification. In as much as the CCF and the Chinese masses haveconsistently paid serious attention to the problems of the transitional period of socialistconstruction, and the leadership has initiated a number of struggles with a view to com-bating class forces, a Marxist-Leninist analysis of 'woman-work' would have been farmore illuminating than a fundamentally Western liberal view of the problem, as has beenadopted in this work. This does not mean that received ideas from whichever quartershould be purveyed. Quite the contrary. It would entail a scientific analysis of the historicalforces brought into play by the revolution and the inter-relationships resulting therefromin a variety of social, economic and political spheres inevitably affecting the role andrights of women. We shall cite only one example of how a scientific approach based onMarxist-Leninist understanding could have been used with profit. One of the majorthemes of socialist construction in China since 1949, and especially since 1963 '(TheSocialist Education Movement'), has been the struggle between the proletarian revolu-tionary line (i.e. the mass line) on the one hand and the bourgeois revisionist line on theother. The two-line struggle reached unprecedented levels during the Cultural Revolution.All aspects of Chinese society, including the development of 'woman-work', have beenpermeated by it. The best accounts of China during the last decade have been those whichhave taken account of the two-line struggle and analysed the relevant material against itsbackground. Such an analysis is possible only by explicitly adopting a scientific approachto history based on the stand viewpoint and method of dialectical materialism, and notby relying merely on an algebraic method of summing up observations and data. DeliaDavin's shying away from developing an analytic explanation of her material from sucha viewpoint is the main weakness of her otherwise informative and detailed descriptionof the development of women's role and rights through struggles under the Chineserevolution.

Pervaiz Nazir*Rural Development in Bangladesh and Pakistan, edited by R. D. Stevens,

Hamza Alavi, P. J. Bertocci. The University of Hawai Press, 1976.Pp- 3395 $15.00.

This book contains papers submitted at the Pakistan/Bangladesh Conference at MichiganState University in 1971, by a number of American, Bangladeshi and Pakistani scholars.They discuss various aspects of rural development, which is defined as 'the whole rangeof technical, economic, political and social changes related to private and governmentalefforts to increase the well-being of rural citizens. As agriculture is the dominant economicactivity in rural areas, a large share of the scholarly work properly has focused on thissector' (p. x). The rationale behind the study of rural development is that the vast majorityof the population in Pakistan and Bangladesh lives in the rural areas. The essays contained

* University of Warwick.

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264 The Journal of Peasant Studies

in the book discuss what is considered a watershed in Pakistan's history (the end of theAyub era, and the genesis of Bangladesh); but the book as a whole does not mark a newera of scholarship on Pakistan or Bangladesh.

The methodological and ideological attitudes of the authors, with a few exceptions, aredominated by an empiricist and class bias. The book is a sort of planners' and technocrats'handbook containing information on the consequences of planners' decision-makingpolicies. With the exception of Alavi's paper (which is a reprint) there is an absence ofany coherent or rigorous conceptual framework. The essays can be categorised into threetypes: firstly, those that deal with the historical development of rural socio-economic andpolitical structures, and secondly and thirdly, the technocratic and statistical ones whichtry to account for the factors responsible for 'rural development' (often used synonymouslywith agricultural development, i.e. increase in agricultural production due to increaseduse of fertilisers, water, high-yielding varieties of wheat/rice, etc.) This is done by pre-senting a number of case studies and instances of rural/agricultural development. Thequestions which are asked throughout the book are: where, and with what effects, havefanners been able to increase their agricultural production ? And what have been theeffects of rural development projects ? These 'typical' problematics are illustrated by thechapter headed, 'The administration of Rural Reform: Structural Constraints and PoliticalDilemmas'. The answer given is typical. '(The) relative absence of institutionalised groups,and the difficulty in creating them, is at the heart of . . . development problems' (p. 29).As is inevitable in any work which lacks a systematic conceptual framework within whichquestions are posed and answered, the role of the state apparatus (bureaucracy, planningagencies, agencies distributing foreign aid) is seen as being neutral vis-cl-vis the variousinstitutionalised groups which compete for scarce resources—these are allocated to thoseagents of change who utilise resources most efficiently. Where there is a relative absenceof such groups or agents of change then the task of 'creating' them becomes the mainconcern of the administrators. The theme is familiar to students of the land question inBritish India, where attempts to create a class of thrifty revenue-paying peasant-proprietorswas a major preoccupation of the colonial administrators in their attempts to stabilise thecountryside.

There are few essays which go beyond the sort of problematics cited above. One paperthat does is the essay on the rural elite by Alavi, which contains a critique of Burki'schapter on the middle-class farmers. This paper is interesting and important for a numberof reasons.

It is the only work in the book which tries to conceptualise systematically the problemof agricultural development; secondly, it avoids the empiricist biases of the other authors;and thirdly, it attempts to locate the question of rural and agricultural development withinthe totality of the Pakistani social formation. Alavi does this by discussing the developmentof agriculture in terms of the development of modes of production which are located in thesocial formation of Pakistan, i.e. the relations between the pre-capitalist and capitalistmodes of agricultural production and their interrelation. Alavi shows that there is nonecessary incompatibility between the capitalist and pre-capitalist mode of agricultureexisting in a single agricultural unit; interestingly, this 'composite' form of agriculturalproduction which is carried out by the larger landowners is contrasted by Burki, withthat of the capitalist middle-class farmers. Burki's thesis that the rise of the middle classhas brought with it a shift in the distribution of or competition for power between themiddle-class farmers and the large landowners is criticised by Alavi on the basis that thesegroups are united in their overall domination of the peasant classes and their objective ofmaintaining the status quo.

This epistemological shift in Alavi's essay induces one to see the problem of ruraldevelopment not in terms of groups competing with each other over scarce resources, butas one of political domination over the poorer sections of the peasantry which enablesthe production and reproduction of class relations in the Pakistani (and by similar analysis)Bangladeshi countryside. Though there are poor peasants and big and small landownersin the other essays in the book, conceptualisation of this inequality in terms of classdomination is clearly missing. Moreover, the book has other shortcomings. There is no

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discussion of the relationship between industry and agriculture: for example, the wayprices of industrial goods affect agricultural prices, or how government policies on indus-trial development have retarded or increased real investment in agriculture; whether therehas been a shift of resources from agriculture to industry and vice versa and the waythis has affected rural and agricultural development. Keith Griffin in Political Economyof Agrarian Change has, for example, presented the thesis that industrialisation policiesin third world countries have adversely affected agricultural development by shiftingresources from agriculture to industry; conclusions of this sort, whether right or wrong,are conspicuously absent in the volume. Further, the economies of Pakistan and Bangla-desh should have been analysed within a global context. Both countries are part of theworld capitalist market economy, and the role of world prices or levels of production anddemand have important consequences for domestic prices, production and demand and,consequently, for domestic resource allocation.

The essays on Bangladesh are generally more rigorous in their presentation than thoseon Pakistan, but the book as a whole does not mark a watershed in the history or ideologyof scholarship in the two countries. The book is a continuation of the weaknesses whichmar that hapless journal, The Pakistan (and Bangladesh) Development Review: limitationsimposed by the very questions that are asked.

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