This book consists of two separate, but related, sections. The fourteen chapters are concerned with analyzing the socio-economic affairs of a single village in Nigerian Hausaland; the long alphabetical Commentary provides that village with a general setting of rural Hausaland and is partly intended as a separate browsing ground. Just as this multi-purpose book has not been designed to be read through from start to finish, so I have not had any particular ‘class of reader’ in mind. I hope that the book will appeal, at the one extreme, to readers with no particular interest in Hausaland (even as a demonstration of the relevance of detailed village studies to wide general questions of rural economic under-development) and, at the other extreme, to those who want to know more about country life in their homeland. As mentioned in the Introduction to the Commentary (p. 201), which is not repeated here, one reason for splitting the book into two sections is to enhance readability: the development economist may ignore the Commentary, while the reader in search of ‘background’ may leave most of the chapters unread.

The first of the fourteen chapters serves as a brief introduction to all of them. Plain facts and figures relating to socio-economic life in our village (Batagarawa) are given in Chapter 11, where the impossibility of distinguishing cash and subsistence sectors is also emphasized.