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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 May 2021
“There are districts in which the position of the rural population is that of a man standing permanently up to the neck in water, so that even a ripple is sufficient to drown him.” With this epigraph, invoking the words of economic historian R. H. Tawney, James C. Scott launched The Moral Economy of the Peasant. His pathbreaking second book describes the social and cultural repertoires through which Southeast Asian peasantries struggled in the 1930s to dampen the ripples and torrents of political and economic change, in an effort to keep their heads above water. In the years since its publication, and despite this seemingly delimited focus, The Moral Economy of the Peasant has generated considerable ripples of its own, energizing the waters through which it has moved over the last four decades. A number of excellent reviews have delved deeply into the origins, inspiration, and impact of this work. Building on these, this short essay attempts to grapple with its intellectual energy, to understand something of how The Moral Economy of the Peasant became, and remains, a touchstone within and beyond the interdisciplinary field of Asian studies.
1 Tawney, R. H., Land and Labor in China (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966)Google Scholar, cited in Scott, James C., The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976), 1Google Scholar.
2 Sivaramakrishnan, K., “Introduction to ‘Moral Economies, State Spaces and Categorical Violence,’” American Anthropologist 107, no. 3 (2005): 321–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Edelman, Marc, “Bringing the Moral Economy Back in … to the Study of 21st-Century Transnational Peasant Movements,” American Anthropologist 107, no. 3 (2005): 331–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Isaac, Joel, “Moral Economy in Its Place: The Contribution of James C. Scott,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 11, no. 2 (2020): 247–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant, 4; see also Moore, Barrington, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966)Google Scholar; Wolf, Eric R., Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1969)Google Scholar.
4 Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant, 3; E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past & Present 50 (1971): 76–136.
5 Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant, 167.
6 Benedict R. Anderson, review of The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia, by James C. Scott, Journal of Asian Studies 37, no. 1 (1977): 172–74.
7 Popkin, Samuel L., The Rational Peasant: the Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brocheux, Pierre, “Moral Economy or Political Economy? The Peasants Are Always Rational,” Journal of Asian Studies 42, no. 4 (1983): 791–803Google Scholar.
8 Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant, 156.
9 Haggis, Jane, Jarrett, Stephanie, Taylor, Dave, and Mayer, Peter, “By the Teeth: A Critical Examination of James Scott's The Moral Economy of the Peasant,” World Development 14, no. 12 (1986): 1448CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 See, respectively, Greenough, Paul R., “Indulgence and Abundance as Asian Peasant Values: A Bengali Case in Point,” Journal of Asian Studies 42, no. 4 (2011): 831–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brown, Ian, A Colonial Economy in Crisis: Burma's Rice Cultivators and the World Depression of the 1930s (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Adas, Michael, “‘Moral Economy’ or ‘Contest State’? Elite Demands and the Origins of Peasant Protest in Southeast Asia,” Journal of Social History 13, no. 4 (1980): 521–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mizuno, Asuka, “Identifying the ‘Agriculturists’ in the Burma Delta in the Colonial Period: A New Perspective on Agriculturists Based on a Village Tract's Registers of Holdings from the 1890s to the 1920s,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 42, no. 3 (2011): 405–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant, 115. Ian Brown, however, has provided a reassessment of the Depression rebellions in Burma and offers an analysis that differs markedly from that of Scott; see Brown, Colonial Economy in Crisis.
12 James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985); James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990); James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998); James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009).
13 Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983); Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).
14 Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant, vii.
15 Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant, vii.
16 Edelman, “Bringing the Moral Economy Back In.”
17 Pamela McElwee, “From the Moral Economy to the World Economy: Revisiting Vietnamese Peasants in a Globalizing Era,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 2, no. 2 (2007): 57–107.
18 Amita Baviskar, In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts over Development in the Narmada Valley (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995); Peter Vandergeest, “Gifts and Rights: Cautionary Notes on Community Self-Help in Thailand,” Development and Change 22, no. 3 (1991): 421–43; Katy Gardner, “‘Our Own Poor’: Transnational Charity, Development Gifts, and the Politics of Suffering in Sylhet and the UK,” Modern Asian Studies 52, no.1 (2018): 163–85; Naomi Hossain and Devangana Kalita, “Moral Economy in a Global Era: The Politics of Provisions during Contemporary Food Price Spikes,” Journal of Peasant Studies 41, no. 5 (2014): 815–31.
19 Edelman, “Bringing the Moral Economy Back In,” 331.
20 Didier Fassin, “Moral Economies Revisited,” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 6 (2009): 1237–66; Johanna Siméant, “Three Bodies of Moral Economy: The Diffusion of a Concept,” Journal of Global Ethics 11, no. 2 (2015): 163–75; Jaime Palomera and Theodora Vetta, “Moral Economy: Rethinking a Radical Concept,” Anthropological Theory 16, no. 4 (2016): 413–32; James G. Carrier, “Moral Economy: What's in a Name,” Anthropological Theory 18, no. 1 (2018): 18–35.
21 Fassin, “Moral Economies Revisited”; Palomera and Vetta, “Moral Economy: Rethinking a Radical Concept,” 414.
22 Palomera and Vetta, “Moral Economy: Rethinking a Radical Concept.”
23 Carrier, “Moral Economy: What's in a Name”; Fassin, “Moral Economies Revisited.”
24 Palomera and Vetta, “Moral Economy: Rethinking a Radical Concept,” 414.
25 Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant, 34; for two recent monographs on precarity, see Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016); Anne Allison, Precarious Japan (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013).
26 Some of these exceptions include Gorman, Timothy, “Moral Economy and the Upper Peasant: The Dynamics of Land Privatization in the Mekong Delta,” Journal of Agrarian Change 14, no. 4 (2014): 501–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pye, Oliver, “A Plantation Precariat: Fragmentation and Organizing Potential in the Palm Oil Global Production Network,” Development and Change 48, no. 5 (2017): 942–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kusaka, Wataru, Moral Politics in the Philippines: Inequality, Democracy and the Urban Poor (Singapore: NUS Press in association with Kyoto University Press, 2017)Google Scholar; Nair, Manjusha, “Land as a Transactional Asset: Moral Economy and Market Logic in Contested Land Acquisition in India,” Development and Change 51, no. 6 (2019): 1511–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
27 Rosario, Teresita Cruz-Del and Rigg, Jonathan, “Living in an Age of Precarity in 21st Century Asia,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 49, no. 4 (2019): 521Google Scholar.
28 Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant, 240.