As a fieldworker who has long studied agrarian systems and economic inequality in the tropical third world, more recently with particular reference to the causes of severe impoverishment, I have suffered much condescension since about 1970 owing both to my unfashionable methods of field enquiry and to my inability to formulate logically coherent conceptual systems of any general appeal. Now that I have widened my scope to include a district of south India (my earlier work for a period of fourteen years from 1953 had been confined to West Africa), I have ventured to write this book as a practical demonstration of the possibilities of formulating, on the basis of detailed fieldwork, a set of coherent hypotheses relating to a specific type of rural under-development which has recently come into existence in certain very densely populated dry grain zones in both West Africa and south India – as doubtless in certain other regions of these and other continents. There is a crying need for systematic categorisation of types of rural under-development in the tropical third world, and I hope that in identifying and analysing this particular ‘dry grain mode’ I shall have done something to encourage other fieldworkers to identify other modes.

The conditions associated with the existence of this dry grain mode are summarised at the beginning of Chapter II, which serves as an introduction to Chapters III to XI – the remaining chapters being historical.