ABSTRACT
These four vignettes-from northern India, Bangladesh, Tanzania and Brazil-point to the immense variety of agrarian social forms, of farming systems and environmental conditions, in the contemporary Third World. The variety defies empirical generalization. None the less, these few vignettes, in all their specific detail, resonate broad themes of agrarian change in capitalism:
• class and gender differentiation in the countryside; • divisions of access to land, of labour, of the fruits of labour; • property and livelihood, affluence and poverty; • colonial legacies and the activities of states; • paths of agricultural development and international markets (for
technology, for finance, for commodities from Tanzanian coffee to Amazonian beef supplying the American appetite for hamburgers);
• relations of power and inequality, their contestation and the violence (from domestic violence to organized class violence) often deployed to maintain them.
