Chapter 1 

Why Subsistence Peasantsare Important

  

The small peasants form a vast mass, the members ofwhich live in similar conditions, but withoutentering into manifold relations with one another.Their mode of production isolates them from oneanother, instead of bringing them into mutualintercourse. The isolation is increased by France’sbad means of communication and by the poverty of thepeasants. Their field of production, thesmallholding, admits of no division of Labour in itscultivation, no application of science and therefore,no multiplicity of development, no diversity oftalents, no wealth of social relations. Eachindividual peasant family is almost self-sufficient,it itself directly produces the major part of itsconsumption. . . the great mass of the French nationis formed by simple addition of homologous magnitudesmuch as potatoes in a sack form a sackful ofpotatoes. [Marx (1852 [1978]):608] What will these men think, who have placed themselveson the vacant spot, anxiously waiting its dispositionby the Government, to find their preemption rightengrossed by the purchase of a million acres? . . .They will do one of two things: either move into theSpanish territory, where they are not altogetheruninvited, and become an accession of power to aforeign nation forming to us a dangerous frontier; orthey will take this course, move on the United Statesterritory, and take possession without your leave.

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What then will be the case? They will not pay youmoney. Will you then raise a force to drive them off?That has been tried; troops were raised, andsent. . . to effect that purpose. They burnt thecabins, broke down the fences, and tore up thepotatoe patches; but three hours after the troopswere gone, these people returned again, repaired thedamage and are now settled upon the land in opendefiance of the Union. (Quotation from CongressmanScott, the First Session of Congress, 1789, quoted inTatter 1933, pp. 91-2, and in de Soto 2000:123-4).

 Introduction

 

Both epigrams to this chapter describe the strength ofsubsistence peasantries relative to centralized marketsand the state. Both describe the trouble thatmodernizing central governments—those of France and theUnited Sates—have with imposing policies on remotesubsistence farmers who engage in subsistenceagriculture. Simply put, both writers observe that thesubsistence peasantry does not need a centralgovernment, and often regards it as a nuisance. Thefirst by Karl Marx, is about his frustration with theFrench peasantry, which he observed was not evenremotely as revolutionary as he wished them to be. Thesecond is from Congressman Scott of westernPennsylvania, addressing the United States Congress inPhiladelphia in 1789. In the quote, he expresses hisfrustration with subsistence peasants living near thesouthern and western borders of the new United States.Both epigrams express a frustration with peasantstrength, relative to “common sense” advantages offeredby the very productive market system admired by bothwriters. Please read them with this in mind, and return

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to them, when you read about the peasants of Tanzania(and elsewhere) below. Despite the fact that the twoepigrams were written over 150 and 210 years ago, bothprovide a still fresh view of how modern developmentplanners look at peasants in places like Tanzania. The Power of the Subsistence Peasantry: Tanzania 1984        My personal story about the persistence ofsubsistence agriculture starts in Tanzania in 1984. Atthat time, I was hired as a manager by the LutheranWorld Federation (LWF) to implement refugee assistanceprojects in a series of villages in which the maineconomic activity was subsistence-level agriculture. Myjob involved organizing villagers into “self-help”labor, in which modern infrastructure was to be builtfor their own use. The “self-help” concept wasstraightforward, at least on paper. LWF, using moneyfrom the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees(UNHCR) would provide materials, and the villagerswould provide labor to build schools and clinics, planttrees, fix roads, start village craft cooperatives, anddig improved wells. In exchange for their labor,villagers would receive payment in the form of rice andbeans provided by the UN’s World Food Program.        Our project rationale was that, since thepeasants were poor and suffering and because they wereworking on the LWF projects, rather than farming, therice and beans would replace the food they wouldotherwise be growing. In other words, the projectassumed that there was a trade-off made by thevillagers, and that when they worked on our projects,they were not working on their farms, and therefore theamount of food produced declined. In other words, timewas money, or at least food.        The “zero sum” rationale of our developmentproject is often illustrated with an old metaphor,[1]

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which describes the vulnerable risk-averse peasantry.The metaphor describes the peasant as standing up totheir nose in a pond.  Any unexpected breeze, or tidewill raise the water level, drowning the peasant.Potentially adverse breezes threatening subsistencepeasants include, crop failure, price fluctuation,drought, illness, increases in taxes, and governmentdemands for labor on public works. In other words, inthe 150 years since Marx wrote about the Frenchpeasantry, and the 210 years since the first U.S.Congress met, the view of subsistence peasants changedfrom being obstinate and conservative, to beingvulnerable, and dependent on international largesse.The program I worked on was designed with the latterassumption in mind.       Now, to understand how planners came to seepeasants as vulnerable to the “time is food”calculation, it is necessary to back up and think abouthow the program I managed was developed. What hadhappened was that some two hundred to three hundredthousand peasant refugees from densely populatedBurundi had fled to sparsely populated Tanzania in1972-4 following war, and civilian massacres. Over onehundred thousand were resettled to inland settlementsin Tanzania away from the border. Others had died, orreturned to Burundi. LWF was to work with the remainingtwenty to forty thousand still living in the borderareas some ten years later. From the perspective of thegovernment, these survivors had “spontaneously” clearedunclaimed arable land owned by the government, andbegun farming in order to feed themselves. Arable landin 1972 was plentiful in this part of western Tanzania,and the locals had no compelling interest in excludingthe Burundians.        In fact the refugees were acting in the same

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way that past generations of farmers in sparselypopulated Tanzania had, by simply moving off into theforest, cutting and burning an unfarmed swath and re-establishing themselves. This was possible becausearable land was abundant and could be had for theclearing without formal purchase. Since no “marketcost” was associated with land, there was only sporadicregistration of deeds; land in Western Tanzania, likeair and water, was available for the taking. What ismore, production of the area’s staple crops was notlimited by the supply of land, but rather by the supplyof labor. If you had enough labor, production wasincreased simply by clearing and planting more land.And despite the need to increase production, this wasdone without improving the mode of cultivation whichwas, the hand-held hoe. Both the high birth rate of theTanzanians (total fertility rate was about 7.0 childrenper woman in the 1970s), and the land’s capacity toaccommodate an extra twenty to forty thousand hoewielding Burundians, attested to the capacity of thesubsistence farmers to expand production into unsettledland in the traditional fashion.        But the general availability of land for thetaking, the persistence of the hoe-wielding farmer, andthe high birthrates, all went uncommented upon by theWestern donors funding our development project. Forthat matter, the Tanzanian government also failed tonote its significance. This is because both existed ina “development paradigm” which saw land, labor, andcapital only through the world markets in which theywere embedded. The development paradigm assumed thatall land was “owned” and available for “purchase” sothat it could be used to increase agriculturalproduction per capita as measured in dollars producedin the market. Revenues in turn would be used toincrease school attendance, control birth rates, and

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raise productivity per unit of land. In short, theagencies and the state were doing what James Scott(1998) calls “seeing like a state.”        In such a context, the work of the subsistencepeasants who built their own houses, cleared their ownland, and grew their own food was effectively invisibleto both development agencies and the government. Eventhough the peasants labored hard they produced littlefor market, even when total production persistentlyincreased in order to accommodate continued populationgrowth. And what increase they did produce came fromclearing new land, not intensifying cultivationtechniques. Neither activity is “seen” in standarddevelopment statistics. Indeed, such “squatting” iscriticized, since clearing and burning land istypically considered to be “environmental degradation”from the perspective of government and developmentagencies. Indeed, they see such “unowned “public domainas useful for the production of taxes and rents for thecentral government, and not as potential fields for asubsistence farmer. As Congressman Scott believed in1789, today’s governments also reason that by default,the government (not the prolific squatting peasantry)owns any undeveloped “public domain.” They are acutelyconscious that the commercial value of their land isdamaged by the hoes and fires of subsistence farmers.[2]         Despite best intentions all around, LWF’sincentive program (i.e. rice and beans) started tobreak down. At first we assumed it was our fault. Thepromised “Food for Work” arrived late, or not at all.The result was that villagers understandably (from ourperspective), stopped providing labor. Later, Food forWork deliveries began again, which should have fixedthe problem, but it didn’t. Villagers still didn’t show

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up for our work days, and without consultation declared“holidays” in the schedule for a variety of funerals,local holidays, and national holidays. We did thelogical thing (by our way of market-focusedmaterialistic reasoning, and a dash of ethno-centrism),and attributed the problem to an inherent laziness.        Finally frustrated with both the World FoodProgram, and the villagers, we then tried somethingcounter-intuitive. We told the villagers that we wouldnot provide any rice and bean incentives, and that theywould have to provide the labor to build the schoolswithout compensation. This proposal was counter-intuitive under the logic of the project, which assumedthat labor and food production were connected. Afterall, the food had served two economically “necessary”purposes. First, the food was the incentive necessaryin the context of a labor market; people in labormarkets do not work for “free.” Second, it replacedrequired food that due to “opportunity costs,” wouldnot be farmed because of the emphasis on schoolconstruction, thereby avoiding a famine induced by ourdemands for labor.        Despite the fears that our new labor programwould cause disaster, the new policy worked. Shiftingthe relationship to one of mutuality resulted in morepeople showing up on the construction sites. What ismore, no villagers starved; apparently, they had neverbeen up to their proverbial noses in flood water. Twoassumptions embedded in the design of our program werewrong. First, the assumption that the population wasliving at the edge of starvation was wrong; second ourhypothesis that people would only work with a materialincentive was not validated. The Subsistence Peasantry as a Trans-national and Trans-historical Process

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        But at LWF, we were not testing hypothesesabout the nature of subsistence agriculture; rather wewere managing an on-going program. Nor had I yet readMarx’s description of independent French peasants, orCongressman Scott’s frustration with Federal policytoward an obstinate American peasantry along the borderwith Spanish America in 1789. So, at LWF we did thepragmatic thing, and simply assumed that the success ofthe “no pay” policy was peculiar to our corner ofTanzania, and continued to assume that Tanzanianfarmers saw trade, labor, and markets as necessary forlife and a way to get rich in the same way that we did.In other words, my colleagues and I continued to applyour neo-classical economic assumptions about therelationship between subsistence, labor, and markets.        At first that is what I did, despite the factthat not only in this part of our work, but elsewhereas well, the neo-classical economic assumptions aboutthe peasantry being up to its nose in water werepersistently challenged. For example, I had an expertmason who would quit every six weeks in order to herdcows, despite the fact that I paid him ten times whatit would have taken him hire the kid who had watchedthe cows the previous week. These were hardly theactions of a peasant concerned about money to buy hisnext meal or seed for the next season! A similarsituation occurred when an expert net-maker refused towork for me at any price, because it was the season tobuild his mud house, and, despite my pleadings andfinancial offers, it was inconceivable to him thatanyone could be hired in a labor market to do thistask.[3]  

A New Paradigm: The Persistence of theSubsistence Peasantry

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 Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania        About the same time I was having the laborproblems on LWF’s projects, I read Goran Hyden’s (1980)book about Tanzanian agriculture, Beyond Ujamaa inTanzania. In this book, Hyden emphasized thatsubsistence farmers, who he defined as those who growwhat they eat and have access to unclaimed arable landoutside a marketplace, will not be responsive togovernment policies because they are “uncaptured” bythe marketplace. He wrote that while they didparticipate in markets—bicycles were a particularlypopular item—if the markets stagnated, they would notbe evicted by a landlord, starve because internationalgrain markets failed, or be unable to build their ownhome. As a result, Hyden wrote, the peasants are“strong” relative to attempts of any type of governmentwho would coerce them into dependence on markets.Notably, this did not mean that they were wealthy orpowerful in terms of the marketplace; but it did meanthat despite material poverty, they would still bringabout the failure of centrally planned projects (likeours), without particularly adverse effects tothemselves. Hyden’s thesis was particularly provocativein the context of a Cold War because he asserted thatthe peasantry was strong as long as there was arableland available; it did not matter whether the economywas based in capitalism, socialism, or even colonialism(See Hyden 1980 and 1982).        Hyden’s idea was a challenge to policy-makers.The policy makers believed the peasants I worked withwere always on the brink of starvation due to marketfailure, and would be pushed “over the edge” if anyfurther demands were made on their labor. Hyden was ineffect saying both the neo-classical and core-peripherytheorists were wrong when it came to Tanzania's

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subsistence peasantry. To buttress his arguments, hedescribed situations during both the German and Britishcolonial days in Tanzania (1890-1961), and during thepost-independence socialist days, when peasantries hadnot overtly “resisted,” government policies through theuse of violence, but simply withheld cooperation in anambivalent fashion.[4] To demonstrate this point, hedeveloped data showing that subsistence peasants werenot “price-sensitive” and in fact operated with respectto their own needs within an “economy of affection,”For example, when coffee prices dropped, coffeeproduction did not decline. This created acontradiction for first the German and later theBritish mercantile colonialists who themselves wereembedded in the markets of their home countries, andsensitive to market demand. Hyden concluded that, whatwas happening was production continued only because itwas necessary for the gift-giving involved in affectiverelationships, and the and the coercive relationshipbetween he colonial administration’s demand for taxes.Production in both circumstances were outside the realmof the marketplace and unnecessary for peasants whocontinued to grow their own staple crops.

Hyden's analysis was rooted in what he had seen andread about during years teaching and living in Tanzaniaduring the 1960s and after. Tanzania had been first aGerman, and then a British colony, before becomingindependent in 1961. After independence, ownership ofthe few Tanzanian companies producing for the worldeconomy, especially coffee, sisal, and other cash-crops, remained in the hands of Europeans, while anIndian merchant minority brought by the British after1920 dominated retail trade and marketing. The bulk ofthe African population, meanwhile, remained subsistencefarmers, a small proportion of whom provided what laborthe plantations required.

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        After 1961, the newly independent governmentunder President Julius Nyerere desired very much forthe peasant masses to become educated, and share in thewealth of the world economy. The new leaders, steepedin Nyerere’s governing philosophy of “African family-hood and self-reliance,” reasoned that two problemswere central. First was that of infrastructure. Whatthere was in terms of factories, capitalist farms, andretail outlets were owned by foreigners, who investedprofits overseas, instead of in Tanzania. Second, theynoted that the millions of rural subsistence peasantswere scattered in the forest, and could not efficientlyproduce for cash crop markets. Because they werescattered, Nyerere reasoned, they were unable to takeadvantage of mechanization and the resulting economiesof scale to be achieved from a differentiated labormarket. The policies the new government adopted in the1960s to deal with these issues were self-consciouslyboth “traditionally African” and “socialist” and becamepopularized under the Swahili term “ujamaa” whichroughly translated means “familyhood.”  Under thebanner of ujamaa, the factories were nationalized andoperated as “parastatal” companies, in which the statewas the owner. The reasoning went that if the state wasan owner, profits would be re-invested in Tanzania.        As for the millions of subsistence peasants,also consistent with the socialist philosophy, thecentral government ordered them out of the remoteforest land they had occupied, and into villages, wherethey were to establish themselves as an African style“ujamaa” village socialist cooperative. This was donewith the coercive power of the Tanzanian militaryduring the 1970s when ten million peasants werevillagized, in one of the largest population movementsof the twentieth century. The reasoning for this wasthat, as part of a village cooperative, peasants would

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enjoy the economies of scale. The economies of scalewhich would be realized from the purchase of tractors,fertilizers, and other tools on the world market, andthe sale of agricultural produce to governmentmarketing boards, would produce greater profits. Inaddition, it was reasoned, the compact villagepopulations made the establishment of a network ofroads, schools, health services—in other words what isknown in Africa and the West as development—moreefficient for the nation and central government.        Most importantly for the ideology of thesubsistence peasant was that at least in word, theywould remain farmers, presumably with the same primevalattachment to the land that they had in the past. Therhetoric of ujamaa emphasizing subsistence values offamily loyalty reinforced this belief; the joys of thesubsistence life could be preserved, and productiveadvantages of world markets realized. In other words,the subsistence ethic would still dominate the economy.The charismatic Nyerere was able to convince thegovernment, the peasantry and international donors thatthis “best of both worlds” scenario was possible. Forthe central government badly in need of revenues fromactivity in the world market, it meant that thepeasantry could be pulled into the taxable marketplace.Happily for the government, it also meant that, atleast in theory, the vacated forests could becomeeasily controlled reserves, from which revenues fromlogging, big game hunting, and national parks wouldresult in direct fees for government coffers.        Despite initial enthusiasm from the Tanzaniangovernment, and generous financing from internationalloans and grants, the socialist ujamaa experiment didnot realize its goals. In particular, as Hyden wrote inthe 1980s, peasants refused to cooperate fully. Afterbeing “villagized” farmers typically did minimal work

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on the communal village farms. Many snuck out of thevillages, and back into the “abandoned” but familiarforests. The communal farms around the country alsodisintegrated for many of the same reasons that ourFood for Work program had: inputs arrived late, andtrucks did not arrive to collect produce. Furthermore,soils could not bear the repeated harvests required forboth the subsistence and market demands of theconcentrated population. And there was a problemfamiliar to me as well: peasants failed to show up forscheduled workdays on the collective farms. As for thegovernment-owned parastatal factories and tradingcompanies, they too collapsed from a mixture ofmismanagement, lack of spares, and fuel shortages.Prices offered by the parastatal companies were keptartificially low, with the result that rural people inparticular stopped producing for the cash markets. Andfinally, after western banks stopped loans in the1980s, the Tanzanian government was unable to financethe debt they had accumulated.        Declines in the size of Tanzania’s marketeconomy in the mid-1980s, resulted in squabblingbetween the capitalist right represented by theInternational Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, andthe socialist left which retained control of Nyerere’sgovernment. By the end of the 1980s, the internationalfinancial institutions as major creditors, had enoughpower to demand policies and market reforms designed bythe IMF. These reforms were implemented in the late1980s and 1990s. Among the policies were sale toprivate investors of government-owned companies, andthe encouragement of foreign investment in agriculture,mining, tourism, and other sectors. Price controlswhich favored urban consumers over rural producers offoodstuffs were also suspended. Private people werepermitted to purchase dollars for shillings on the open

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market, without fear of arrest. Today (2005), the oldadversaries from right and left are again staking outold positions about whether the data validates the IMF-inspired policy or not. But this is not really thepoint as far as this book is concerned. This book isnot about how to get a country to engage in the worldmarket system, but why a subsistence peasantry canstill be persistent in the context of the enticementsof world markets. It is important to return to theargument Hyden made in the early 1980s when assessingTanzania's socialist failures.         Hyden wrote that peasants who can grow whatthey eat, and have access to a supply of arable land,are embedded in “economies of affection” and thereforeinsensitive to market incentives like those that wewere using in LWF’s programs. By economies of affectionHyden meant that the mutual obligations that kinshipgroups and neighbors felt to each other, outside of therealm of the marketplace were more important thanmarket incentives. This is why the mason mentionedabove, while more than happy to work for me at anextortionate rate when time permitted, did not view hisobligation to watch cows as being negotiable in thelabor market. And because he was not dependent on mywage to survive, he stopped working when his affectiveresponsibilities took precedence over my offer offinancial gain. Frustrating for me—not him—was the factthat, in a remote undifferentiated labor market, he wasthe only skilled mason available, and as a result, mywhole culvert fixing operation stopped, while a grownman undertook labor for which he could have hired a kidfor less than one dollar per day.        According to Hyden, the key to understandingthe Tanzanian subsistence peasantry, and theirreluctance to spontaneously embrace the opportunities

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offered by modern labor markets, rests in the readyavailability of arable land. So long as land isavailable for the clearing without reference to themarketplace, there is little need for a subsistencepeasantry to differentiate into the type of specializedskilled laborers we needed for our constructionprojects. In the event that our demands (or those ofthe government) became objectionable, the peasantry“withdrew,” not by going on strike or “resisting”, butby bending with the new policy. Or if worse came toworse and their houses were burned, they did as theAmerican peasants described on the border of SpanishTerritory did in 1789: retreat further into thesparsely inhabited forest, and start all over againwith or without the acquiescence of a foreign power, asCongressman Scott had predicted.        In fact without recognizing it, I had seen anexample of such movements by peasants in the 1980s. TheBurundian refugees had done just that by “fleeing” fromBurundi to Tanzania in 1972-74. Thus, while thepeasants did not necessarily have the narrowspecialized skills we needed, they had the ability, asundifferentiated family labor rooted in the “economy ofaffection,” to build a new house and grow enough foodto avoid coercive “capture” by the labor market, orexcessive tax demands of the state. But, producinglittle for the market, they were also invisible to it;even while expanding into ever more remote tracts ofempty land nominally “owned” by the government. Such amode of production of course isolates kin groups fromeach other; thus while relations may be intense withinthe family, they may have little dependence oninteraction with others in the broader world. Eachhousehold becomes as Marx wrote a “homologous magnitudemuch as potatoes in a sack for a sackful of potatoes.”        Furthermore, Hyden pointed out, it was only

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when the capacity of the subsistence peasantry to“escape” was blocked, that differentiation into amodern economy could begin. This “blockage” typicallyoccurs through military force, as Tanzania tried in the1970s, or when the supply of land is limited due todemographic pressure. When this happens, Hyden said,the “economy of affection” which is rooted in theaffective needs of subsistence agriculture, may breakdown as the labor market is commodified and as youngpeople leave the farm to seek wage labor onplantations, or in cities.[5] This is another way ofsaying that it is replaced by the incentive systems ofthe modern labor market, which were assumed by theproject design in our Food for Work program. Pursuing Ideas of the Uncaptured PeasantryThe Classic Anthropologists: Malinowski, and Mauss        Hyden’s ideas were a revelation which I tookback with me to the United States where I begangraduate school in 1988. Among the first books I readwere Bronislaw Malinowski’s classic Argonauts of the SouthPacific, and Marcel Mauss’ The Gift. Both were about therole of gift-giving in the maintenance or relationshipsin “traditional” societies rooted in subsistenceactivity.        While neither Malinowski nor Mauss addressedthe question of the issue of land-rich subsistencefarmers, both books emphasized that exchange in pre-modern subsistence societies was not about marketadvantage, and the accumulation of material wealth, butabout the establishment and maintenance ofrelationships. Or in other words, social relations arewhat generated economic exchange, and not the opposite.“Prices” such as there were, were the product ofconvention and/or affection.        Malinowski in particular wrote about how social

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status in the Pacific’s Trobriand Islands wasmaintained through trade in kula necklaces, made ofshell. He wrote that the necklaces were highlydesirable as gifts, even though they did not help theowner increase production or wealth, like a tool,fertilizer, or machine would; indeed the only practicaluse of the necklaces was to mark out symbolicallyfriendship networks, and with their resultingreciprocal obligations.[6] Malinowski was able tofollow the path each individual necklaces had takenaround the islands, as they marked out suchrelationships.        Mauss’ book The Gift had similar but moregeneralized observations about the importance of gift-giving: 

What they exchange is not solely property and wealth,movable and immovable goods, and things economicallyuseful. In particular, such exchanges are acts ofpoliteness: banquets, rituals, military services,women, children, dances, festivals, and fairs, inwhich economic transaction is only one element, andin which the passing on of wealth is only one featureof a much more general and enduring contract. (Mauss1967:5).

 In my mind, whether it came from Mauss or Malinowski,and was called a gift, property, or wealth this wasHyden’s “economy of affection.”         A perspective from agricultural economics: Ester Boserup        Another piece was filled in for me, afterreading Ester Boserup’s (1966) descriptions of howincreases in population density forces change in howsocieties produce their subsistence. She wrote that, aspopulations become denser, to accommodate the crowdingthere is a specialization of labor, intensification of

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land use, and consequent increases in productivityarising from innovation. In other words, as the ratiobetween arable land and available labor decreases, morecrops are produced per unit of land due to innovationsin tool use, e.g. animal traction, fertilizers,irrigation, and mechanization. As a result, a divisionof labor, in which the peasant who formerly was able todo a little of everything but only with a modicum ofskill at each task, specializes in fewer and fewertasks. In the process, the peasant becomes dependent onthe anonymous marketplace to trade for personal needs.This is more efficient in terms of economic utility andproduction, as she pointed out. Karl Polanyi’s Description of “The Great Transformation”        Still later in my graduate student career, Iread Karl Polanyi’s (1944) The Great Transformation, whichin the early 1990s had again become popular in academiadue to its relevance to the transition from Communismto market capitalism in eastern Europe. Polanyiemphasized that any conversion of a non-capitalistsociety, to one organized by marketplaces was likely tobe rough. This happened in large part becausecapitalism dismantles rights to social welfareprograms, whether of an informal nature such as thatfound in pre-modern feudal and subsistence societies,or more formal systems such as those found in easternEurope up until the 1980s. This happens as laborbecomes a commodity, and people begin sell it on theopen market. Polanyi’s case study of this process wasof Great Britain, where the “Poor Laws” were dismantledin the early nineteenth century, in order to force arural population which had enjoyed traditional rightsto parish-based welfare programs into the industrialworkforce of London.

But in Polanyi’s description of Europe, I saw not

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what my professors pointed out to me about easternEurope of the 1990s, but the subsistence peasants I hadtried to work with in Tanzania. The enclosure movementin Europe, which lasted from the fifteenth andtwentieth century involved farmland across much of thecontinent. This movement refers to the period whenputative land owners typically nobles or clan chiefs,fenced off land which had previously been shared as“commons” by communities of peasant farmers throughinformal traditional norms about the grazing ofanimals, farming, hunting, and a multitude of uses thatunfenced land could have for a farming society. In suchsystems, farmers might possess rights to cultivate oneseason, but shared rights to graze animals in the off-season. By “enclosing” the land often with fences, thenew owners asserted “ownership” and put the land touses which generated the most profit in internationalmarkets, whether or not it generated subsistence forthe local population. To me, this seemed to be what hadhappened with ujamaa socialism, and the villagizationof Tanzania’s peasantry. Polanyi described theenclosure movement in the following fashion: 

Enclosures have appropriately been called therevolution of the rich against the poor. The lordsand nobles were upsetting the social order, breakingdown ancient law and custom, sometimes by means ofviolence, often by pressure and intimidation [andonly rarely through the mechanisms of marketeconomics, which came later]. They were literallyrobbing the poor of their share in the common,tearing down the houses which, by hithertounbreakable force of custom, the poor had longregarded as theirs and their heirs. The fabric ofsociety was being disrupted, desolate villages andthe ruins of human dwellings testified to thefierceness with which the revolt raged, endangering

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the defenses of the country, wasting its towns,decimating its population, turning its overburdenedsoil into dust, harassing its people and turning themfrom decent husbandmen into a mob of beggars andthieves. Though this happened only in patches, theblack spots threatened to melt into a uniformcatastrophe (1944:35).

         By my mind, the “lords and nobles” in Tanzaniawere the succession of colonialists, merchantminorities, government officials, and aid officialsdesigning economic programs for the rural subsistencepeasantry which also involved the assertion ofownership of land rights which had not been therebefore. As in England, the disruptions they broughtwith their programs were indeed great. Most recently,the socialist-era ujamaa villagization programs I hadobserved “upsetting the social order, breaking downancient law and custom, sometimes by means of violence,often by pressure and intimidation” had moved tenmillion peasants off their traditional subsistenceplots, and into villages. There, the central governmentrequired them to farm as a cooperative, send theirchildren to school, and abandon traditional huntingactivities. How Focusing on the Subsistence Peasantry is Different from ConventionalThinking

The broader interest in social sciences in the early1990s was not in “lords and nobles” but in “core-periphery theories.” Core-periphery theories describedhow the capitalist “core” countries benefited fromunequal trade relations with “peripheral” countries,particularly countries in Asia and Latin America. Itwas typically pointed out that these relations wererooted in the advantages that the factories of the westhad when setting prices for commodities like coffee,

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tin, cotton and copper that many poor countriesproduced. In these models, the victims of pricefluctuations are peasant growers of coffee (or othercash crops) who suddenly cannot buy food when pricesdrop. When this happens lands must be mortgaged in thenew land market because farmers are no longer able topurchase food. Famine relief may even be imported fromelsewhere.        But, while sympathetic to the points that core-periphery theories made about the rapidly urbanizingareas of the Third World, I still couldn’t see how suchan approach applied to the areas of Tanzania where Ihad helped implement our Food for Work program. Infact, the places I worked produced no such commoditiesfor the world market, but nevertheless the communitiesfed themselves. As poor as they might be, the wildfluctuations in prices for world commodities did notthreaten the existence of Tanzania’s subsistencepeasants. The price of maize and beans they producedmay fluctuate in market value, but most of theproduction never entered the marketplace. The rains,crop diseases, and the availability of arable land hadmore effect on productivity, than did world commodityprices.        In other words, I thought that Hyden was rightto call the peasants I knew in Tanzania “uncaptured” byworld markets, and in effect still outside the worldeconomic system. The many “peasantries” producing cashcrops like coffee, tea, rice, maize, cotton etc., forworld markets, and buying their food, clothing andbuilding materials in cash markets, were in my mind“captured.” They are, as a result, very sensitive tocommodity prices in the world marketplace. But for thisreason, they were also fundamentally different from theTanzanian peasants I knew, who were so ambivalenttowards the incentives provided by the “Food for Work”

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programs. In my mind, these peasants were more like thepeople described by Malinowski, Mauss, and Polanyi. 

Relocating the North American SubsistencePeasantry, via Modern Africa

       One of my more significant post-Ph.D. activitieswas to return to Tanzania in 1994, where I was again amanager of refugee assistance programs, this time inthe mammoth Rwanda refugee relief programs (Waters1997, 2001). At the time, I had remote feelings thatthe flight of peasant refugees from over-populatedRwanda to sparsely populated Tanzania were confrontingthe same issues Hyden and Polanyi had written about. Inparticular the Rwanda genocide seemed to me to be thesort of catastrophe that Polanyi had described whenwriting of “upsetting the social order, breaking downancient law and custom, sometimes by means of violence,often by pressure and intimidation. . . .” There wascertainly violence and intimidation in Rwanda, and itwas also the case that in 1994, Rwanda was the mostdensely populated country in Africa, the result of anextraordinary birth rate among the rural peasantryduring the last forty years. Boserup had claimed thatsuch a situation would create conditions to innovate orexpand farmland. But, I thought that there was a thirdalternative, typically unstated, that was also present:catastrophe, whether rooted in ecological, political,or social conditions.[7] Pa Ingalls as an Uncaptured Peasant        Oddly enough, my next encounter with a“subsistence peasantry” did not come during my day job,which involved a focus on my own narrowly defined jobdescription managing relief goods, but in the long

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evenings. Our two small children were in Tanzania withus, and in the absence of television, videos, andcomputer games I read out loud to them a great deal inthe evening. Eventually, I read the Little House series byLaura Ingalls Wilder. Like most Americans, I consideredmyself familiar with these stories, having myself readthem as a child, and later watching them on thetelevision program starring Michael Landon. But readingLittle House books in Africa, after having readMalinowski, Mauss, Boserup, Polanyi, Marx, Weber, andDurkheim, seemed different. Suddenly, I became awarethat the story Laura Ingalls Wilder told of her parentsCharles and Caroline and her husband Almanzo, was thesame one that Hyden wrote with an academic voice aboutthe Tanzanian peasants who were my neighbors.        What Hyden and Wilder had in common was thatboth Hyden’s Tanzanian peasantry and Laura’s husbandand parents, were subsistence farmers, escaping theintrusion of state and marketplace by fleeing towardsan ever-receding frontier. The descriptions of Wilder’sparents in Little House on the Prairie resonated particularlywell with the peasants I observed in Tanzania who wouldfeed themselves, build houses, hunt, raise animals, anddoctor their own illnesses. Charles Wilder in the spaceof the story, (which took place between about 1871-73)hewed logs, hunted, cleared land, planted, dug a well,farmed, built a log house with fireplace and plankfloor, fiddled, and grew his own food. He stayed at arespectful distance from the threatening entanglementspresented by the town, not even bothering to file aclaim for the land his family squatted on. The raretrips he made to market were to trade furs for thedelights, not necessities, of frontier life: molasses,sugar, coffee, cloth, and glass for a window. His wifeCaroline raised three small daughters, helped raiselogs on their cabin walls, cooked, churned butter, spun

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thread, made a feather bed, treated malaria, wovecloth, cleaned, sewed, and negotiated with Indians. Asin the case of the Tanzanian peasant, what droveIngalls out of his “little house on the prairie” werenot the temptations of the marketplace or crop failure,but the determination of the United States military toeliminate white settlers from land that the governmentin far-away Washington reserved for Indians, undertreaty. Thie Ingalls were in effect “villagized,” inthe same manner that Tanzanian peasants had been in the1970s.        The rest of the “Little House” books chronicleCharles Ingalls’ continuing flight towards the recedingfrontier, where slowly, only the more marginal landswere available. In the course of the book series, whichcovers roughly the period between 1867 and 1883, heestablishes homesteads at The Little House in the Big Woods(Wisconsin), Little House on the Prairie (Kansas), On the Banks ofPlum Creek (Minnesota), By the Shores of Silver Lake (Minnesotaagain), a farm in South Dakota, and finally becomes alaborer in Little Town on the Prairie (South Dakota again).Only toward the end of the series are the Wilders nolonger fleeing the army, rather it is the more quietlycoercive mechanisms of the modern American economy:banks, creditors, and ultimately, the modern schoolinghis daughters desired. According to his daughter Laura,Charles Ingalls himself never gave up his dream of afarm. Even as he became trapped in town as a carpenterin the cash marketplace, his daughter Laura said hedreamt of making one more move to the Montana frontier.        Ironically, I could see Charles Ingalls in theTanzanians who were working for me in the labor marketthat I managed for LWF. Talking to them, their dreamsfor their lives and retirement still focused on farmswhere they would be surrounded by parents, siblings,and children. Many of the Tanzanians had left families

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on farms in their home villages, and viewed theirsojourn as a driver, manager, carpenter, or mason asbeing temporary. Savings were sent home, where moneywas invested in a homestead surrounded by thesubsistence fields of the rural life. They did notdream, as I do of a life in a university library, or asmany of my friends do of retirement to a golf resort,gazing at a seacoast, or life set amidst the Manhattanskyline. For the Tanzanian, when possible, bags ofhomegrown maize were brought from home to sustain themwhile they spent time earning wages, which often paidtoo little to purchase enough maize and beans to feedtheir families. If they were laid off, they returnedhome to farm.[8] And I think most of them felt similarto the assistants of anthropologist Mariam Slater whowrote of people in southern Tanzania: 

From the Nyika view, men are not progressively freedfrom primary production. They are driven fromsubsistence activities—and [banana beer]—tomeaningless ones. Even [my educated and modernizedtranslator] Zinzendorf in the long run showed himselfto have internalized the goals but not knowledge ofthe means of the West. [My other helper] Gilbertreally only wanted to remain a farmer. . . .Evenamong the kingdoms of the Interlaclustrine Bantu,such as Buganda and Bunyoro, the divine king receivedfew personal rewards, only collecting wealth toredistribute it, taking care that his own infirmitieswould not ‘spoil the country’ as Zin translated it(Slater 1976:120)

         Marx would of course have seen Zinzendorf andPa Ingalls as nothing better than “homologousmultitudes” as similar to each other as potatoes in asack. For that matter, Ma and Pa Ingalls’ flight intoever-remote areas, even as the army destroyed their

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farm, was similar to that of their predecessors on the1789 Spanish frontier. Certainly they were not therevolutionary proletariat Marx believed would rise up.Pa Ingalls searched ever further for the equivalent ofthe “Spanish territory” over the hill, where they wouldbe permitted to farm and hunt in peace, while avoidingthe demands of the differentiated marketplace. An Engine of Demographic Growth: The Ecology of theProlific Settled Rural Areas        My diversion by the Little House books led meto further reading about the “American peasantry.”Modern Americans hesitate to think of their ancestorsas “peasants,” preferring the more honorable term“pioneer.” Nevertheless, it is also clear, that by mostdefinitions, the Europeans who settled the NorthAmerican frontiers from the 1600s to the 1800s were bymost classical definitions, subsistence peasants.[9]        For me, the nature of North America’s ruralEuropean peasant population was pointed out mostclearly in an obscure essay by the historian WilliamMcNeill. [10] The essay was about the “ecology” ofhuman migration which emphasized the relationshipbetween food producing “settled farming” areas, and thecities that they supported. But it also extended toareas on the agricultural frontiers where nomads lived.McNeill’s model of Eurasian migration and disease,assumes that the healthiest population is always the“settled rural population.” It is this population whichhas the most well-developed disease resistance as aresult of their long association with theirdomesticated animals from which the “diseases ofcrowding” like smallpox, measles, and tuberculosisfirst emerged.[11]        Also contributing to the robust health of suchrural populations is the fact that they lived in

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settlements dispersed enough so they did not “foultheir nest” with their own sewage, as city dwellersdid. Indeed, up until about 1850, urban mortality rateswere consistently higher than the settled rural areas.The malnourished adolescent poor of late eighteenth-century London were so short that only two societies inthe world, the exceedingly impoverished Lumi and Bundiof New Guinea, were shorter. (LeBlanc 2003:176-178;McNeill 1976:56-58).[12]        Finally, unlike their brethren in the cities,rural subsistence farmers inherently had ready accessto food supplies, without relying on vulnerabletransportation systems, and price-sensitivemarketplaces. Besides weather, all the settled ruralpopulations had to fear really, were two types ofdepredations: that from the city, in the form oframpaging armies and tax collectors, and that from thefrontier periphery, which was simply rampagingbarbarians.[13] The relative positions of the frontier,rural periphery, and city are represented in Figure1.1.        Under normal healthy conditions, in McNeill’sformulation, the population of the settled rural areawas healthier than either the urban population or thenomads living on the periphery. Of the three groups, italso had the highest birth rates. (This was also theposition of the nineteenth century French peasantry,which Marx compared to a sackful of potatoes). Bydefinition, a settled subsistence peasantry which isnot pushing up against the carrying capacity of theland, is virtually self-sufficient in its daily needs.The primary contact between the urban center and therural periphery came in terms of taxes which the ruralperiphery paid to the city, and trading for the fewluxuries of life, such as what Pa Ingalls sought. Inthe absence of invasion, drought, famine, and epidemic

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disease, birth rates on the order of six to eightsurviving children per woman are common among suchsubsistence farmers. The consequence though, iseventual over-population of the settled rural areas. Insuch a situation migration becomes necessary. Thosecoming of age in the settled rural areas will migratetoward the city, to seek a future in the marketplace,or towards the periphery on the frontier, where theywill try to recreate their old way of life. 

                

Figure 1.1—Diagram of ecological relationshipsin an agrarian society (after McNeill 1978).The center is the urban areas, which is in turnfed by the “settled rural areas” which are the“engines of early modern society.” McNeillrefers to Settled Rural Area to Urban Areamigration as “Dick Whittington” migration.Settled Rural Area to Periphery migration is“Daniel Boone” migration.

 Country Kids Made Good: Dick Whittington and Abraham Lincoln

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        So in the absence of an invasion, excessivetaxes, raids, or other activity to limit population, agrowing rural peasant population will expand, and inMcNeill’s model they have two places to go. Individualscan go to the city, which McNeill calls “DickWhittington” migration, because his paradigmatic caseis the poor thirteen year-old rural orphan, DickWhittington, who went to London in 1370 to seek hisfortune in a city he believed had “streets paved withgold.” Whittington ended up being appointed Lord Mayorof London by the King. Americans might be morecomfortable thinking of this type of migration as being“Abraham Lincoln” migration, after the president whowas born in a log cabin on a subsistence farm ofinsecure title in Kentucky, and as a youth was engagedin subsistence activities of 

clearing timberland for crops, cutting brush andburning it, splitting rails, pulling crosscut saw andwhipsaw, driving the shovel-plow, harrowing, spading,planting, hoeing, cradling grain, milking cows,helping neighbors at house-raisings, logrollings,corn-huskings, hog killings. (Sandburg 1954:14-15).

         Lincoln, like Whittington, became successful inthe big city, in his case Springfield, Illinois, andWashington, D.C.. McNeill’s point is that this type ofmigration involves poor subsistence peasants, whoabandon life on the farm, and seek the “bright lights”of the differentiated markets of the city.        But naming the rural-to-urban type of migrationafter the poor boys made good is in many respectsdeceptive. In the cities, few migrants end up like DickWhittington or Abraham Lincoln, achieving outstandingsuccess. Usually, they ended up as laborers in themonotonous factories of rapidly growing cities. And atleast as often as they found outstanding success, they

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also found the life of Whittington and Lincoln’sopposites: those who in Polanyi’s terms are turned from“decent husbandmen into a mob of beggars and thieves.”Charles Dickens’ Fagin and Oliver Twist come to mind asequally appropriate paradigms to illustrate life in theearly industrial city.        Indeed, conditions in the city were so brutal,that rapidly urbanizing areas like early nineteenthcentury London are described by historical demographersas being “population sumps,” that is, places in whichmore people died than were born. Indeed, London fromthe 1600s to the 1800s had a death rate twice as highas its birthrate (LeBlanc 2003:177).[14] In otherwords, without the population surplus of the settledrural areas, and a demographic or political push toleave, the cities withered, as indeed they did inEurope following the Bubonic Plague epidemics of thefourteenth century and after.        Nevertheless thisWhittington/Lincoln/Fagin/Twist type migrationcontinues even today, as rural populations move to thecities of India, Africa, and China. Urban death ratesmay not be as high, but the central paradox of “decenthusbandmen” abandoning old and tried means ofsubsistence remains. Indeed, it even continues to becommon in North America where immigrants from rapidlygrowing rural areas of Latin America continue to fillthe specialized labor demands of America’s labormarkets. For example in California, peasant migrantsfrom rural Mexico fill positions in the garmentindustry, janitorial services, farm labor, andhousework in the twenty-first century. As will bediscussed in detail below, such migration is also foundin Africa today. Country Kids as Frontier Pioneers: Daniel Boone Migration

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Until recently, the child of the settled rural area in North America, pushed off the land by the forces of demography, did not have to go to the city, gold streets or not. Particularly for North America’s European colonists, another option was attractive: thisoption involved leaving the crowded settled rural areas, and moving towards a vacant frontier. In the case of North America, this frontier was effectively being vacated, because beginning in 1492 populations ofNative Americans perished under the onslaught of European military attacks, and especially newly imported Eurasian diseases. In other words, Euro-American children in the crowded settled rural areas ofeighteenth and nineteenth century could flee westward, clear land, and resume the peasant life they were born into. McNeill called this type of migration “Daniel Boone migration” after a leading figure of North American frontier settlement. Boone was born on the Pennsylvania frontier in 1734, and died on the Missourifrontier in 1820.        Like the Wilders, Boone pushed further andfurther away from the expanding marketplaces of theeast coast, building and abandoning cabins, farms, andhunting grounds as he went. Throughout his life, he andhis extended family fled further into the frontier, re-establishing itself every twenty years or so asindependent farmers and hunters, as rural areas thatthey had pioneered caught up with them, and became“settled.” The last move he made was in 1799 when atage sixty-five he moved from Kentucky into SpanishMissouri. The size and significance of this “DanielBoone” migration which took place in the lateeighteenth and into the nineteenth century, should notbe underestimated. The European population on the NorthAmerican frontier was extraordinarily healthy, a factthat was reflected in robust fertility, and population

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growth rates which are among the highest ever known forlarge populations. For example, Ohio’s Europeanpopulation quintupled from 45,000 to 230,000 in the tenyears between 1800 and 1810 censuses as prolificfarmers migrated from the rapidly growing easternstates. Other Midwestern states experienced similarrapid growth between 1790 and 1840, spurred by the highfertility rates of North America’s settled rural areas,and the availability of land to the west.[15] The Rural Peasantry and the Expansion of the NorthAmerican Frontier        Who were North America’s first Europeanfarmers? Again, I believe that they were the samesubsistence farmers described by Goran Hyden in Africa,and those I knew in Tanzania in the 1980s. What ismore, they were similar to the “homologous multitudes”that Marx knew in France, and Laura Ingalls Wilder sawas a child in the late in the nineteenth century. Theyestablished farms in the frontiers without reference tothe marketplace, had primary loyalties to extendedclans. They hunted and raised the food they ate. Theiractivity in the marketplace was typically restricted toluxury goods, and non-necessities. Land tenure wasmaintained through informal relationships, and threatsof violence. Most significantly, as with the peasants Iknew in Tanzania, the basic production and consumptionunit was the same: the extended family. Finally, as inwestern Tanzania in the 1980s, land was available forthe taking. A minor difference was that fertility ratesin the early American republic were probably higherthan in modern Tanzania.        The contemporary American historian who hasdriven home this point best is Charles Sellers (1991),who published a book about the “capture” of thisAmerican peasantry in the early years of the nineteenth

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century. His central point is that American politicsbetween the end of the War of 1812, and the presidencyof Andrew Jackson (1829-1837) were about the competingvalues of a rural subsistence peasantry, and the urbaninterests of the new industrialists. It was a battlebetween the urban folk like Abraham Lincoln (andDickens’ Fagin), and the Daniel Boones of the youngrepublic. The farmers themselves, much like Pa Wilderhad two choices, at least as long as land was readilyavailable. They could acquiesce and produce largeamounts of food for railways and grain markets in thedifferentiated markets—and purchase a proportion oftheir subsistence in the same marketplace. Or as longas land suitable for subsistence was available for theclearing, they could respond like Daniel Boone, byretreating further west even into Spanish Territory,taking with them their nostalgia for an independentlife of self-reliance.  

Where it all Began: how Scotland learned to“truck, trade, and barter”

 Adam Smith and the Emergence of Scottish Industrialism        In 1999, I had a chance to visit family friendson the remote Isle of Harris, in the Outer Hebrides ofScotland. This happened at the same time that I wasbeing pushed to read the Scotsman Adam Smith’s book, AnInquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1775),which economist friends insisted was at least asimportant to understanding the nature of the modernworld as Karl Marx, Max Weber, and the othersociological theorists. Not surprisingly, perhaps, evenin Smith’s writing, I found confirmation of what I hadread in Polanyi, Weber, Marx, and seen in Tanzania.

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Smith too wrote about a transition from subsistenceeconomies, where every household undertook a diversityof tasks, none of which they were particularlyefficient at, to specialization which, of its ownnature, led to greater overall production. In short theScottish peasant he described raised their own food,built their own homes, made their own clothes, andengaged in long distance trade only for light andportable luxury goods.        In developing his point about the power ofspecialized labor, Smith enthusiastically described ahumble pin factory, which has since become economicshorthand for describing the magnificent efficienciesrealized as a result of the division of labor in themodern factory in particular, and modern society ingeneral. Later writers believe that his description wasbased on the water powered looms for the manufacturedof linens, but the same principle applies: 

To take an example, therefore, from a very triflingmanufacture; but one in which the division of labourhas been very often taken notice of, the trade of thepin-maker; a workman not educated to thisbusiness . . . nor acquainted with the use of themachinery employed in it . . . could scarce, perhapswith his utmost industry. . . certainly could notmake twenty [pins in a day]. But in the way in whichthis business is now carried on, . . . it is dividedinto a number of branches . . . One man draws out thewire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourthpoints it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receivingthe head; to make the head requires two or threedistinct operations, which in some manufactories, areall performed by distinct hands, though in others thesame man will sometimes perform two or three of them…I have seen a small manufactory of this kind whereten men only were employed, [and] . . . they could,when they exerted themselves, make among the . . .

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upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. Eachperson, therefore making a tenth part of forty-eightthousand pins, might be considered as making fourthousand eight hundred pins in a day. But if they hadall wrought separately and independently, and withoutany of them having been educated to this peculiarbusiness, they certainly could not each of them havemade twenty. (Smith 1775:10-11).

 But, the factories of Scotland in the late 1700s wereconfronted with a need to persuade the children ofpeasants to become factory workers. What Smithneglected to mention in his triumphal story of woolensor pin manufacture was that workers were moving intothe factories only in the context of violence andeviction from traditional homesteads previously “owned”by Scottish clans. Many of the workers in the newfactories had only recently come available for hirebecause they had been driven from their land in ruralScotland. In the late 1700s Edinburgh and Glasgowagriculture may have been undergoing an economictransformation (see Perelman 2000:171-195, Parry 1980).But the labor for the new factories was coming frompeasants who were evicted from their traditional landsfollowing the English military victory over traditionalclan leaders in the Battle of Culloden in 1746.[16] Title to the land had been awarded to the allies of theEnglish who asserted personal title, and sought to usetheir titles to the best market advantage, and notnecessarily in the interest of those who hadtraditional rights.        Smith in his focus on what he believed theinherent goodness of traditional manufacturing, ignoredin his book what was happening in the remote ruralareas both near and far from Edinburgh (see Perelman2000:184-6). Indeed, from the perspective of Scotland’s“subsistence peasantry” the critical points that Smith

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made about factory work were buried in hisdescriptions. Nevertheless Smith acknowledged thatefficiency, developed from the division of labor,occurs only in the context of increasing populationdensity, just as Hyden, Boserup, and others wrotelater. Critically, Smith also noted that labor becomesmore efficient, only to the extent that people engagein specialized market activity. If they do not, forwhatever reason, he said that the small householdremains the site of consumption and production, withall the inefficiencies of unspecialized labor. In otherwords, without enough people to buy and use pins (i.e.a broad market), there is not going to be a pinfactory. Modern Scotland and Polanyi        The reading of Scotsman Smith brings up thesecond leg on which this Scottish story rests, which isthe demise of the rural Scots peasantry on the remoteIsle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides. Harris itself in1999 was a small treeless island of about two thousandpeople connected by a narrow isthmus to the island ofLewis immediately to the north. In 1999, there were fewjobs left on the island and little incentive for youngpeople to seek their future there; much of theremaining population lived on welfare payments fromdistant London. In short it is dependent on its role inthe wider world. Harris has been declining inpopulation since 1910, particularly in the rural areas,as farmers left their stone cottages for the cities ofScotland, England, Canada, and Australia. Thecombination of a barren windswept landscape, and anancient human habit of building houses by stackingheavy stones means that the ruins of human dwellingsstill dot the landscape. Of all the places I have beenin the world, the evidence of Polanyi’s Great

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Transformation has been most clearly seen on Harris,where “the ruins of human dwellings [testifying] to thefierceness with which the revolt” described by Polanyi,were evident even in 1999, a time when the onlysubsistence production was the local cutting of peatfor winter warmth. All other production was purchasedin the marketplace, whether with welfare payments orearnings from the relatively few salaried jobsavailable in the local economy.        Rarely is the puzzle of the GreatTransformation presented so starkly. Despite theisolation and distance from the rest of the world,archaeologists indicate that subsistence peasants havelived on Harris for 3,400 years. The traditionalsubsistence economy, which had been shaped bynourishing the soil in the valleys still protected fromwinds, building and maintaining stone houses, fishing,cutting peat, and raising sheep for meat and wool hadworked. The puzzle of course is, why then did thislifestyle die out during the last 100 years? How didthe population of self-sufficient farmers which hadpersisted for so long, suddenly disappear?[17] Was thiswhat Polanyi meant when he wrote that 

The fabric of society was being disrupted, desolatevillages and the ruins of human dwellings testifiedto the fierceness with which the revolt raged,endangering the defenses of the country, wasting itstowns, decimating its population, turning itsoverburdened soil into dust, harassing its people,and turning them from decent husbandmen into a mob ofbeggars and thieves?

         The central point in my mind was the fact thatup until the nineteenth century, the people of Harrislived there isolated, as subsistence farmers andfishermen, with and without systematic reference to the

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distant world markets. They reproduced lives, in thesame way that the Burundian refugees and Tanzanianpeasants I had known in the 1980s had. True, life wasnot luxurious, and famine was an ever-presentpossibility. But as with the Tanzanian peasants, theisland’s population had not starved, and at times hadprospered demographically; indeed, the societyreproduced its way of life without welfare payments, orother significant trade with the outside world forhundreds or thousands of years. But in 1999, Harris’population which was of smaller number than two hundredyears before, was no longer able to do this. They hadpassed the subsistence threshold and were no longerable to return to the old ways of life. Deskilled ofpeasant talents in sheep rearing, fishing, farming,house-building, spinning, sailing, and a host of otheractivities they are like the rest of us, dependent on afunctioning global economy for life itself. 

How Daniel Boone and the Isle of Harris areRelevant to Modern Tanzania

       I believe what I saw in the ruins of Harris iswhat is happening today in Tanzania, albeit in buildingmaterial less-durable than Scottish stone. Like theScots of the past, Tanzanians in the past and thepresent, build their homes themselves, albeit inperishable sticks, mud, and grass. I believe that thefact that these materials are less durable than stoneis the only reason remote areas of Tanzania are notlittered with ruins, as was the case in Harris.        In Tanzania, the clearance of the subsistencepeasantry is also similar, although the legaljustifications are different. Peasants are excludedfrom land by a central government intent on modernizing

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(i.e. gaining access to international markets) bypushing peasants into production for the foreignexchange needed to purchase the petroleum products,computers, medicine, books, vehicles, and otherproducts of the world economic system needed to make amodern society. At first, new wealth meets only theneeds of urban elites; perhaps later as a middle classemerges, many more people will come to share in thebounty. But as Polanyi emphasized, “black spots” stillemerge, and at times threaten calamities, and lead tothe abandonment of once productive land. The people ofHarris today, while perhaps the lineal biologicaldescendants of these subsistence peasants, are not thesame people. Is the same thing happening in Tanzaniatoday? Is Tanzania risking “black spots,” assubsistence peasants are pushed off of the land, andinto Tanzania’s new urban factories, or even into thenew fields where the products are corn and meat? Fromthe idyllic country-sides of east Africa, millions havetaken up residence in informal settlements of megacities like Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam. They live inslums where wage labor is difficult and paid poorly,land titles non-existent, and death rates high. If welook closely, can we see Polanyi’s “black spots” in thevillages abandoned and in the mobs of beggars andthieves eking out a “living” in urban slums. It is thesame revolution of the urban rich against the ruralsubsistence peasant that Polanyi described.

Notes 1. The metaphor is from R. H. Tawney, who was describing the

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early twentieth century Chinese peasantry. It is usedprominently as the first epigram in James Scott’s book, TheMoral Economy of the Peasant.2.  In James Scott’s (1998), development agencies andgovernments “see like a state,” and perceive the land interms of potential revenue. They are very much embedded inthe same ethic as Benjamin Franklin who viewed an unusedasset as one whose potential was lost. States do not “see”the land as a subsistence farmer does.3.  Actually, my favorite story was about literal bonfiresof cash in a remote village along the Burundian border in1985. The Tanzanian government gave the country one week inwhich to exchange all of their cash, in an attempt to catchsmuggling operations which had large quantities of TanzanianShillings squirreled away. The unintended consequence inKitanga Village, which was about one hundred kilometers onfoot from the nearest bank was not a hurried attempt byambitious young men to collect the money, and then make along lucrative trip to exchange the money for a percentage.Instead the villagers torched what cash they had, in ahedonistic display of conspicuous consumption. This ishardly the action expected of people up to theirmetaphorical noses in water (See Waters 1992a).4. In the literature, there is a wide assumption that lackof cooperation with development efforts is part of peasant“resistance” to coercive measures. James Scott haspopularized this concept in his books The Moral Economy of thePeasant, and Weapons of the Weak. As with many of thetheoretical ideas discussed in this book, I think that thisidea is salient, but incomplete, when the nature of asubsistence peasantry is considered. It assumes that peasantsare inherently weak relative to the state, a situation whichHyden in particular has demonstrated is not always the case.I think that the idea of “resistance” assumes away otherplausible peasant motives for lack of cooperation withoutsiders. Among the qualities that may also be relevant,particularly in the case of subsistence peasants, areambivalence, and plain old organizational inertia. This isnot to discredit actual acts of “resistance” which emerge

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out of a shared consciousness. Rather it is to put them inthe context of other plausible qualities.5.  The commodification of labor is sometimes referred to asproletarianization.6.  An individual acquiring the kula necklace could sell itto a visiting anthropologist, but the obligations would notnecessarily be transferred with it; the necklace in fact hadlittle utilitarian value outside a specializedanthropological collection. Certainly as part of thatcollection, it no longer marked out friendship patterns        The closest analogy in Western society I can thinkof is a child’s artwork, which decorates many agrandparent’s refrigerator. It is “priceless” to thesentimental grandparent, but worthless in the inherentlyunsentimental marketplace. Even assuming that this “art”became valuable for some market-related reason, this valuewould still be different than that that had accrued to it asa gift from a grandchild to grandparent. The same could besaid of the kula necklaces described by Malinowski.7.  In this context, I believed that my provocative readingof social theory and Goran Hyden, was of relevance inunderstanding the origins of the 1994 Rwanda refugee crisis.Rwanda before the crisis was a densely populated country,with a huge portion of the people dependent on subsistenceagriculture. Since the 1970s, it had become apparent thatthe land could no longer support the burgeoning population,and Rwanda was faced with a situation where either theeconomy would need to differentiate economically, or theagricultural population settle new lands which wereavailable only across international borders. In the 1980s,the President of Rwanda made some efforts at locatingfarmlands for the Rwandan peasantry in places as far away asGabon (see Newberry 1995:14-15). Kigali, the capital alsotried to absorb hundreds of thousands of displaced ruralyouth. The 1994 genocide strikes me as qualifying as thetype of “catastrophe” which “upset the social order,” with avengeance. The ethnic extremism that is associated with the1994 genocide of the Tutsi was the immediate proximate causeas the genocide. But such an ideology was particularly

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attractive to displaced Hutu youth who had few hopes forlife in either the new modern economy, or the oldersubsistence economy.8.  The Rwandan refugees were more blunt about their desireto return to their farms. Most desired nothing more than toquit the refugee camp, and return to their farms in Rwanda.This was a major problem, as hundreds of thousands of otherRwandan refugees who had been in Uganda and Congo for theprevious thirty years, had returned, and were using thefarms of the refugees who fled to Tanzania and Congo. Sincethe refugees from Tanzania and Congo were forcibly returnedin 1996, arguments and disputes over land have been animportant issue in land-poor Rwanda, which is still crowdedand in the context of a rapidly growing population, landpoor. This is despite the death and disappearance in 1994-6of 10-15% of the total population as a result of genocide,war, and flight.9. William Cronon (1983) in Changes in the Land makes thispoint particularly forcefully. Hernando de Soto (2000:105-51) in The Mystery of Capital makes it less directly, but equallyforcefully. The people settling North America did not viewland or its products in the same manner that they are viewedin the capitalist marketplace today.10. McNeill, William (1978) “Migration” in Human migration:patterns and policies, edited by William H. McNeill and Ruth S.Adams.11. Historians of disease like William McNeill (1976; seealso McNeill and McNeill 2003) point out that many of thediseases which have killed humans in epidemic proportionshad their origins in micro-organisms that crossed over fromanimals which due to domestication, started coming in closecontact with humans. Examples include smallpox (cattle),measles (dogs), leprosy (water buffalo), common cold(horses), etc. See also McMichael 2001:101.12. In a similar vein, Steven LeBlanc (2003:177) writes,“states can almost be considered nothing more than citiessurrounded by farmers.” The point is the similar to thatMcNeill makes.13.  Drought is a chronic risk for subsistence farmers,

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albeit not a “depredation” in the sense used here. Butdrought typically occurs in the context of a number ofsocio-ecological conditions, among which are how far thepeasantry has pushed into marginal lands due to populationpressure, and the effects of scarcity and rising prices inthe city. In the latter case, the type of transportationavailable for efficient movement of bulk crops is also afactor.14.  Stature and mortality studies also consistently showthat settled rural areas were more healthful than urbanareas. Average height and rising fertility rates are bothassociated with industrialization, at least until the end ofthe nineteenth century. See e.g. Atack and Passel 1994:xvi-xviii, and Gallman 1996:35-328.15.  Estimates are imprecise, and depend on the area. Buttotal fertility rates between about 1790 and 1810 in the newUnited States were probably on the order of 8-9 children perwoman. This applied to both free and slave populations. Theearly nineteenth century population of Europeans andAfricans was among the healthiest and most prolific ruralpopulations ever seen. Some of the best studies of theEuropean farming populations of North America have been doneon the French-Canadian population which first settled inQuebec in the seventeenth century, and had robust growthrates through the nineteenth century (see Livi-Bacci 1997).16.  Smout (1986:14-16) points out that by the 1830s, much of the Scottish Lowlands already had undergone a capitalist transformation, and were “factories for making corn and meat.” Quoting an English visitor, he noted: “This great farm almost reached the sublime. It went like clockwork. Itsfields of from twenty to thirty acres, were all rectangular.There were no odd corners, no thickets, no hedgerow trees, no ragged, any-shaped pastures. The quickset hedges were clipped low and narrow like those of a garden. No wild rose or old man’s beard rambled on them, no may or blackthorn blossom lit them up, neither did the violet or the primrose find a lodging beneath their shade. There were no open ditches, and the plough ran right up to the roots of the fence. The land was as clean as a well-kept garden.”

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