Author(s)

Publisher

Publication Year

ISBN: 9781773635217

Categories: , , , ,

Tag:

 
View more details about this title
on the publisher's website:

Go to publisher’s site

Tiny Engines of Abundance

A History of Peasant Productivity and Repression

New!

This book provides a historical and comparative perspective of peasant productivity using case studies portraying the extraordinary efficiency with which English cottagers, Jamaican ex-slaves, Guatemalan Mayan campesinos, Nigerian hill farmers and Kerala hut dwellers obtained bountiful and diversified harvests from small parcels of land, provisioning for their families and often local markets. These stories provide us with pictures of carefully limited needs, of sustainable livelihoods and of resilient self-reliance attacked relentlessly and mercilessly in the name of capital, progress, development, modernity and/or the state.

For two hundred years we have been told that the hundreds of thousands, or millions, or billions of hungry mouths require that peasants be dispossessed to allow more industrious farmers to feed them. This book helps make it clear how wrong we have been. Handy’s approach is original, and the book will engage people interested in the history of the peasantry, rural development, and the quest for food sovereignty.

Contributors

Jim Handy

Jim Handy is a professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan. He has written extensively on Guatemalan history and more generally on peasant economies, agrarian reform and political economy. He has been president of the Canadian Association for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, which awarded him a Distinguished Fellow recognition in 2015, particularly for his contribution to graduate student training. He has received numerous teaching awards and the J.W. George Ivany Internationalization Award by the University of Saskatchewan.
Chapter Title Contents Contributors Pages Year Price

Preview

 Chapter 1 introduces the premise of the book, which is to reexamine the idea of progress that we tie to the evolution of industrial agriculture over the last 200 years. Examination of this period … 8 $0.80

Preview

 Chapter 2 examines England and Wales from the late 1700s and early 1800s, in the midst of what has often been called an agriculture revolution. This chapter argues that appreciation for the … 21 $2.10

Preview

 Chapter 3 examines Jamaica in the decades following slave emancipation in the 1830s, when Jamaica was often put forward as exemplifying the calamitous results of a prosperous peasantry. Topics … 23 $2.30

Preview

 Chapter 4 examines Guatemala during the mid-20th century, as various governments sought to “modernize” Mayan traditional milpa agriculture, resulting in a genocide directed at Mayan … 23 $2.30

Preview

 Chapter 5 examines Nigeria in the 1960s and 1970s, when governments– advised by Western development specialists– sought to “capture” peasant production and boost export … 22 $2.20

Preview

 Chapter 6 examines the Indian state of Kerala, a small state in the southwest of the subcontinent that had been the site of ongoing reforms beginning almost immediately after its formation in … 23 $2.30

Preview

 The conclusion reflects on the author’s hopes that the book could help portray the hardships and resilience peasants have displayed over the last 200 years across the globe. 4 $0.40