The discussion of property-holding reveals that the majority of the population owns very little. Their plots of land are too small to provide them with subsistence, let alone with a surplus to sell for cash, which they need to pay taxes and to buy consumer goods, such as sugar, tea, clothes and paraffin. It is difficult to find a way of supplementing this meagre income within the market economy for jobs are scarce, and a minimum of capital is needed to trade. Those categories of the population such as small-holders, southern migrants, and women who cannot get a living within the market economy, must fall back on extra-market relationships.

These are of two kinds, those entailing obligations of mutual help, and those predicting a political relationship of subordination and dependence. The first is specific to members of a ‘tribal’ orc ‘lineage’ community, who must have rights in lineage property to qualify as such. The fact that support is available from this source goes some way towards explaining why there is such resistance to selling land. The second type of extra-market relationship is the patron-client relationship which provides for the patron's dispensation of goods and protection in exchange for the client's performance of various services; although the distributing of wealth and the command of services is no longer so closely associated with the estate system, the latter is clearly still relevant.