ABSTRACT
Like the family, the local economy was a site of conflict, and, this chapter examines dispute stemming from debt, land transfers, and employee suicide. These three forms of economic conflict illuminate key aspects of justice making in Ba County. Legal cases following employee suicides reveal enduring non-economic meanings embedded within putatively economic relationships, and the ways in which both the community and court used these other meanings to impose extra-economic burdens of support and care on employers. Local understandings of the relationship, often backed by the court, bent economic relationships to fit the expectations of responsibility and demands for justice. Economic relationships sometimes required violence to impose contract compliance and conformity. Land was also a major source of conflict in the county. Outstanding rents or other payments drove many disputes, and these economic exchanges remained, down to the late nineteenth century, a subject of ongoing contention and violence.
