This book was written accidentally. Prevented by immigration restrictions from working in Nigeria for longer than three months, in 1977 I decided on the spur of the moment to seek my fortune in south India instead, despite my entire unfamiliarity with that continent. The idea of comparative intercontinental work had not occurred to me until I had spent some time in the Karnataka (south Indian) villages, when I realised, to my surprise, that I was in a rather familiar environment in terms of the kind of enquiry on rural economic inequality and individual poverty which I was again resolved to undertake.

As this book attempts a radical assault on prevailing orthodoxy, I doubt if it could have been written by an ordinary member of a university department, such as I had once been myself, for in close academic communities only those of high status are acceptable non-conformists – which is not to deny that one department may include two violently opposed schools of thought.

A cardinal intellectual error of our times seems to amount to a belief in a ‘standard condition’ of under-development in tropical food-farming societies, for how otherwise can one account for the belief that so much prevailing orthodoxy on matters such as economic inequality and the causes of severe poverty has universal validity, despite the flimsiness of the empirical basis?