State, Market, and Peasant in Colonial South and Southeast Asia

The essays collected here focus on peasant responses to the spread of market-oriented economic systems in the colonial era. Some explore the ways in which the colonial state sought to draw cultivators into export production, others the processes by which intermediary groups, particularly immigrant and indigenous moneylenders, both facilitated this process and helped to undermine the agrarian systems in which it occurred. More than half are devoted to everyday avoidance protest patterns in both the pre-colonial and colonial periods, which it is argued were far more typical peasant responses to state demands and market dislocations than the revolutionary movements that had all but monopolized scholarly attention until the early 1980s.