10 - The Neglect of Farm-Labouring Systems

Summary

‘It seldom happens that the person who tills the ground has wherewithal to maintain himself till he reaps the harvest.’

Adam Smith (1776: 168)

In this chapter, which deals with both free and bonded (attached) farm-labouring, I endeavour to show how variable, and well-adapted to the labourers' functions, the numerous farm-labouring systems are apt to be. In West Africa, in particular, the notion of a homogeneous labour force (hired labour – unqualified) is apt to be nearly as misleading as that of the amorphous peasantry; and it is equally common.

Unless they happened to be economic historians like Adam Smith, British writers on economic principles have traditionally ignored agricultural labourers completely, both because they invariably dealt in terms of labour (labourer does not occur in their indexes), and because the matters of labour and wages implicitly relate to industrial production. Partly for this reason, and also because, as we have seen, official third world statistics usually underestimate the numbers of farm labourers, the significance of free farm-labouring systems continues to be played down by development economists, though the question of bonded labouring, which is relatively insignificant statistically, has excited much more interest. The prolonged and hopeless obsession with defining topical peasants has even induced the neglect of the free labourer, and has led to many absurd attempts to define peasants as non-labour employing cultivators. Considering the common and regrettable tendency to equate labourers and landless labourers, it is presumably often thought, though never stated, that labourers are not peasants.