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Book chapter | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | Peasant differentiation in Southern Rhodesia, 1898-1938 |
Author: | Phimister, Ian |
Book title: | The State and the Market: studies in the economic and social history of the Third World |
Year: | 1987 |
Pages: | 66-104 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | Zimbabwe |
Subjects: | class formation farmers |
Abstract: | Current interpretations of African agriculture in Southern Rhodesia (colonial Zimbabwe) tend either to point to peasant 'disintegration' and the decline in the general economic condition of the peasantry, or to present peasant cultivators as surviving as a significant economic force well into the 1950s. By disaggregating 'the' peasantry and specifying the process of rural class formation and differentiation, the present author argues that it is possible to reconcile evidence of immiseration with signs of prosperity. The way in which different regions were incorporated into the wider economy was itself crucially influenced by the uneven spread of commodity relations. This may explain the variety of experience exposed by local studies. A combination of those pockets of precolonial accumulation which had survived the violence of the 1890s and the productive reinvestment of income earned in wage labour, gave rise to a distinctive pattern of rural differentiation. By the early 1920s, a class of small farmers had emerged. They cultivated significantly larger fields and owned more livestock than the majority of rural black cultivators. Not even the Great Depression and the desperate efforts of the settler State could entirely stifle them. Notes, ref. |