Abstract
Around the turn of the nineteenth century, the productive activities of Southeast Asia’s peasants were limited in scope, output volume and specialisation by low market demand, relative isolation, poor infrastructures, and simple technologies. Much the greater part of what they produced was aimed at meeting their own subsistence requirements, and the methods of production they employed were primarily geared to that end. Over the succeeding two centuries, however, the transformative potencies of state strengthening, global commerce and demography wrought change — sometimes elaborative, sometimes gradual, more recently radical and rapid — to peasants’productive patterns. This chapter seeks to describe and explain the evolving varieties of productive arrangements to which Southeast Asia’s peasants, under the impact of new demands and restraints, resorted over the long stretch of these years.
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© 1997 R. E. Elson
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Elson, R.E. (1997). The Changing Varieties of Peasant Production. In: The End of the Peasantry in Southeast Asia. A Modern Economic History of Southeast Asia. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25457-6_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25457-6_3
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