“Agricultural Involution” and Its Critics: Twenty Years After
Author(s)
White, Benjamin
Abstract
There are two general approaches to assessing what is known as ‘development’. First, there are classical accounts focusing on Europe’s development during the industrial revolution. They describe how urban areas expanded at the expense of the social and economic resources of the rural areas, disrupting an independent subsistence peasantry. The second (more common) approach to development focuses on the modern Third World. This approach assumes that, as with Europe, the entire Third World is dependent on the modern capitalist system. Discussion is typically reduced to comparisons between world systems theory and neoclassical economics. The Tanzanian government has used standard policies grounded in neoclassical and world-system assumptions since independence. But both policies failed to produce the predicted economic growth. This article argues that both policies failed because the Tanzanian peasantry, like the early modern European peasantry, is not dependent on the operation of world capitalism for basic subsistence. In fact, as studies have shown, rural Tanzania is only weakly incorporated into the capitalist world system, and in consequence has not been an easy target for what world-system theorists call ‘peripheral integration’. What makes Tanzania different is the fact that the rural peasantry do not use market mechanisms in the distribution of the ‘means of production’, especially arable land for swidden agriculture, or, for that matter, labor or cattle.
