Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 July 2025
The story of agrarian transition in southern Morang in many ways epitomises the larger crisis facing the global peasantry and its relationship with capitalism in the early decades of the twenty-first century. Capitalism is expanding into the most peripheral corners of the world, and the peasantry, particularly those at the base of the agrarian structure – who are facing rising costs and agroecological stress – are increasingly drawn into capitalist labour markets via migration and local off-farm labour. It is these articulations between the capitalist and pre-capitalist which are increasingly central to peasant livelihoods.
Recognition of this process of agrarian transition whereby capitalism and peasant farming co-exist, with the former providing substantial profits to the latter, is of course not new and, as noted at the start of this book, these phenomena are generating renewed academic interest (Shah and Lerche, 2020; Zhan and Scully, 2018; Sehgal, 2005). However, what has received far less attention is the added complexity posed by additional axes of exploitation on the farm which long predate the peasantries’ integration into capitalist labour markets. This is a gap which this book has sought to address with a focus on the additional layers of livelihood stress when the economic and cultural burdens of neoliberal capitalism intersect with the legacy and persistence of landlordism and rent-seeking merchant capital. In doing so, this book offers a more nuanced analysis of the ‘pre-capitalist’ itself and its symbiotic (rather than subordinate) relationship with capitalism.
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