Essays On The Political Economy Of Rural Africa

The essays in this volume represent a dialogue between theory and data. The theory is drawn from a branch of contemporary political economy which can also be labeled the collective-choice school. The data are drawn from Africa. The book extends the methods of reasoning developed in collective choice from their original base-the advanced industrial democracies-to new territory; the literature on rural Africa. Such as extension challenges the power of this form of political economy. It also enriches it, for the central questions which motivate the contemporary study of political economy are often addressed with unique clarity in the scholarship on rural Africa.

The gestation period of this collection has been lengthy even by academic stan dards. Some of our long-suffering contributors prepared their original drafts for a workshop held in Nairobi in 1967, and although they have all up-dated their contributions they are still essentially reporting on research conducted in the late 1960s. However, we feel that their various findings and analyses of the issues they respectively treat have a continuing validity in our comprehension of the problem of rural development. Other contributions reporting on more recent work have been incorporated at different times since, most of them not commissioned especially for this symposium but all adding something to our understanding of the problem. The slow accumulation of material which makes up this fmal collection parallels an evolution in our own collective thinking, if indeed not that of most students of 'development' over the past decade. The progression has not been towards fmal clarification of the complex and changing East African realities, nor towards formulation of an accepted model for their analysis; rather, it has been marked by the questioning of the initial, somewhat simplistic assumptions with which some of us started out and a continuing debate and widening polar ization of views about the significance of that process of government 'pene tration' of the rural areas which is our focus, about the positive or negative value of 'development' policies in East Africa and, indeed, about the appropri ate theoretical approaches to the study of 'development' in general.

This volume is concerned with integrated social and economic development in the Third World. It directs special attention to the psychological manipulation of peasants in order to keep them on the land and, where possible, make them more productive. In Part One, Henry Bernstein outlines and illustrates concepts for the analysis of contemporary peasantries. His introduction provides a general, historical framework for understanding the relationship of contemporary peasantries to "modernization." It is followed, in Parts Two and Three, by case studies of programs in Colombia (Rosemary E. Galli), Mexico (Hannes Lorenzen and Ernest Feder), Tanzania (Bruno Musti de Gennaro), and Bangladesh (Elizabeth Hartmann and James K. Boyce). In Part Four, Rosemary Galli offers a concluding essay on "Rural Development and the Contradiction of Capitalist Development." In this book, empirical evidence combines with personal experiences to cut through the rhetoric of those who consider "the underdeveloped nation" as an abstract unit. It reveals the variety of contemporary rural development strategies. From their synthesis emerges a picture of the internal political configuration of underdevelopment—the role of international capital and technology in rural areas and in assessment of the impact upon peasant farmers. This book persuasively argues that international agencies, supporting and supported by national governments and elites, promote development policies inimical to the welfare of rural cultivators.