2 - Subsistence and the market I

Summary

Rural Bengal in the first half of the twentieth century poses all the conceptual problems and complexities of an agrarian society with an extensive subsistence base which at the same time was tied firmly to a far-flung market. In such circumstances, does the peasantry constitute a distinctive moral and political economy largely retaining its ‘non-maximising subsistence ethic’, or can it be seen as a body of ‘rational economic decision-makers’ responding to ‘market opportunity’? Recent historiography of the peasantry in contemporary South-East Asia has predictably produced antithetical views on a question posed in such antithetical terms. The concept of a hard-headed ‘political economy’ has been set against that of a more benign ‘moral economy’ of the peasant; ‘subsistence ethic’ finds its contrast in ‘investment logic’ as the true motivation behind peasant economic behaviour, and explanations of peasant political protest oscillate between the polarities of ‘moral outrage’ and ‘personal gain’. From a different angle, the relative strength of the impact of demographic and market forces on agrarian economy and society is a question that continues to divide historians of pre-industrial Europe. Even those who treat the evolution of pre-industrial peasant societies within the framework of a demographic model in terms of homeostatic ecosystems are far from agreed on the issue of the peasant response to the market and the efficacy of market forces in bringing about structural change.