Introduction

Our explanation of the political weakness of smallholders as a class has so far been advanced mainly from a ‘bottom-up’ perspective: it has treated factors in the sphere of social and economic organisation rather than those in the realm of state and national polity. Chapter Seven focused mainly on the divisions and conflicts of interest among smallholders which arise from variations in the natural, technical and economic features of agricultural production systems. Chapter Eight was concerned mainly with the ways in which traditional social organisation and culture, and contemporary agrarian socio-economic relationships, create or fail to create sets of social categorisations which may be exploited in the competition for mass political support. Chapter Nine dealt with the consequences for mass political consciousness and action of ethnic conflict and of the nature of local-level political leadership in the Dry Zone. However, the influences of state and polity on smallholder political action have not been entirely ignored. It has been argued that the state has made the local rather than the national political arena the focus of demands for access to state land (see Chapter Three); helped particularise smallholder demands and consciousness along individual crop lines (see Chapter Seven); and avoided stimulating smallholder political mobilisation by refraining from taking provocative policy initiatives like compulsory crop procurement and rural taxation (see Chapters Five and Eight).