The Egalitarian Moment: Asia and Africa, 1950–80. By D. A. LOW. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xiv + 131. £10.95, paperback (ISBN 0-521-56765-3).

Abstract

These four essays by the distinguished historian Anthony Low, best-known to Africanists for his writings on Uganda, constitute the Wiles Lectures given at the Queen's University, Belfast in 1994. Tightly argued, they revolve around a straightforward point. Despite the political impulse which brought about attempts to create an egalitarian society in the Asian and African countryside, the dominant pattern in the generation after the Second World War was one of the strengthening of the class of rich peasants or kulaks. With a few exceptions, Low points to the effacement of landlord regimes and systems based on inequality from above and through status. Attempts to break the back of the rich peasants succeeded only in certain authoritarian states such as China and Viet Nam and even then, the kulaks reasserted themselves. It is the radical experiments such as Mengistu's Ethiopia and Nyerere's Tanzania that Low best likes to juxtapose with displays of power and effective accumulation from below. The implication must be the evisceration of continued attempts to create an egalitarian countryside. Low ranges widely in making this point looking at East Africa, Ethiopia, Egypt, Iran, India, China and the Pacific and his breathtaking sweep makes this suggestive book an enjoyable read.