Markets, Class and Social Change : Trading Networks and Poverty in Rural South Asia

by Crow, Ben

• ISBN13: 9780333946008
• ISBN10: 0333946006
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2001-12-14
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

At the beginning of the 21st century an idealized view of markets informs government policy. Real differences in how markets interact with social change are obscured and public action on poverty is constrained. This book uses a detailed study of the grain trade in Bangladesh to show how socially-constrained patterns of market involvement may systematically benefit the rich while disadvantaging the poor. The book suggests that markets are implicated in the making of society, its division, identities, and directions.

Author Biography

Ben Crow is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Table of Contents

List of tables	viii
List of figures	x
Acknowledgements	xiii
Glossary	xv
Exploring market diversity	1	(19)
How mud-floored markets illuminate `the market'	4	(1)
From market thinking to market making	5	(5)
Analyzing real markets	10	(4)
Method	14	(3)
Overview of the book	17	(3)
Class and change in the South Asian countryside	20	(26)
Contrasts of prosperity and exchange in two rural areas	20	(6)
Agrarian change in rural South Asia	26	(8)
Identification of peasant classes	34	(2)
The partial separability of class and gender, household and individual	36	(3)
Households and classes in rural Bangladesh	39	(5)
Conclusions	44	(2)
The diversity of exchange	46	(42)
Traders, marketplaces and market circuits	48	(7)
Transactions	55	(3)
Transactions in two regions	58	(3)
Common class patterns across diverse exchange conditions	61	(3)
Interlocked transactions and the market architecture of the Noakhali chars	64	(3)
Returns, risks and costs in interlocked transactions	67	(12)
Conclusions: explanations and implications of exchange diversity	79	(9)
Grain outflows: advantage rich, disadvantage poor	88	(26)
A problem of `free market' prices	89	(3)
Output, sales and payments in kind	92	(3)
Noakhali chars: the peculiarity of exchange with sharecropping and closed trade	95	(7)
Bogra: open trade and the Green Revolution	102	(3)
Household grain storage patterns	105	(3)
Seasonal participation and trader procurement	108	(2)
Power, the seasons and interlinked transactions	110	(3)
Conclusion	113	(1)
The markets of adversity, or why the rich don't buy rice	114	(23)
Independence of the rich: class patterns of grain inflow	115	(3)
Why poor peasants pay high prices	118	(2)
How poor and labor households get food	120	(5)
Grain stocks, needs and vulnerability	125	(2)
Consumer participation by class	127	(6)
Conclusions	133	(4)
Why are big traders big and small traders small?	137	(37)
Scale and background of traders	139	(5)
Processing: survival and accumulation	144	(8)
Trade and lending: risk and survival	152	(14)
Why are big traders big and small traders small?	166	(5)
Conclusions	171	(3)
Why is agrarian growth uneven?	174	(21)
How surplus is appropriated	176	(2)
Distribution of the grain surplus	178	(7)
Nonagricultural incomes and cash payments	185	(2)
Appropriation through finance	187	(2)
Accumulation in trade	189	(2)
Uneven growth nine years later	191	(2)
Conclusions	193	(2)
Local consequences of global policy	195	(17)
Governments, markets and ruling ideas	196	(4)
Liberalization in Noakhali: mills decline and crushers rise	200	(3)
Liberalization in Bogra: `millgate procurement' and a market for public office	203	(5)
Government action and consumer prices	208	(2)
Global ideas and local institutions	210	(2)
Diverse markets and public action	212	(19)
Markets and social science	212	(4)
Openings: identifying and exploring some omissions	216	(3)
Contexts: social bases of exchange	219	(5)
Practices: traders and transactions	224	(4)
Light: socially situated markets and public action	228	(3)
Appendix: Identifying class	231	(14)
Notes	245	(3)
References	248	(10)
Index	258