Rural Development in Southeast Asia
Dispossession, Accumulation and Persistence

Rural areas and rural people have been centrally implicated in Southeast Asia's modernisation. Through the three entry points of smallholder persistence, upland dispossession, and landlessness, this Element offers an insight into the ways in which the countryside has been transformed over the past half century. Drawing on primary fieldwork undertaken in Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, and secondary studies from across the region, Rigg shows how the experience of Southeast Asia offers a counterpoint and a challenge to standard, historicist understandings of agrarian change and, more broadly, development. Taking a rural view allows an alternative lens for theorising and judging Southeast Asia's modernisation experience and narrative. The Element argues that if we are to capture the nature – and not just the direction and amount – of agrarian change in Southeast Asia, then we need to view the countryside as more than rural and greater than farming.

Reviews & endorsements

'… this synthesis gives rural research in South-East Asia a prominent place in the understanding of the societies of the region since we see more than elsewhere the marks of forced or wanted change.' Émile Soupa, Moussons

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Product details

• Date Published: September 2020
• format: Adobe eBook Reader

• isbn: 9781108622349
• availability: This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.