ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author discusses the three ethnographic and analytical themes which have run through the monograph, but he starts and finishes with two recent and contrasting studies which address the wider problem of economic rationality and rural change. “The rural folk start from the needs and capacities of the house, using the market not to make a living but to purchase what they cannot produce and store what they cannot hold”. Indeed as agro-industrial capitals created further areas of valorisation by partial appropriations of the rural labour process, conditions for surplus extraction by large, wage-labour farms were progressively eroded. The growing dependence of agriculture on industrial products has strikingly different consequences for family-farmers, wage-labourers, and capitalist owners. This is a commonplace of rural history, and the cause of some very visible conflicts, at least since the 19th century when the labourers of the Tuscan Maremma, like Luddites elsewhere, began the destruction of threshing machines.
