Rural Development in Southeast Asia: Accumulation, Dispossession and Persistence

Rural areas and rural people have been centrally implicated in Southeast Asia’s modernisation. Through the three entry points of smallholder persistence, upland dispossession, and landlessness, the book offers an insight into the ways in which the countryside has been transformed over the last half century. Drawing on primary fieldwork undertaken in Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, and secondary studies from across the region, the book shows how the experience of Southeast offers a counterpoint and a challenge to standard, historicist understandings of agrarian change and, more broadly, development. Taking a rural view allows an alternative lens for theorising and judging Southeast Asia’s modernisation experience and narrative. The book argues that if we are to capture the nature – and not just the direction and amount – of agrarian change in Southeast Asia, then we need to view the countryside as more than rural and greater than farming.