Thailand is a good place to hone your scepticism about grand narratives of progress. Whether the story is about urbanisation, industrialisation, democratisation or secularisation, Thailand demonstrates that the pathways to the present—let alone the future—are meandering and unpredictable. A good number of Thai society's ‘twists and turns’ (p. 11) are explored in Jonathan Rigg's important book on rural Thailand. As the subtitle suggests, his interests lie as much with the ‘textures of Thailand's agrarian transformation’ as with its trajectories. In this pursuit he is very successful, producing a rich and nuanced account of the complexity of contemporary rural livelihoods.

From the first page of the book Rigg is grappling with a puzzle: agriculture has become much less important in Thailand's economy than it used to be, yet the number of smallholders remains high. The experience in many other countries, combined with the prognoses of development theory, suggests a reduction in agriculture's contribution to GDP will be matched by a reduction in the rural population. There is plenty of evidence that Thailand is not following this pattern. Why?

In answering this question, Rigg encourages his readers to think about ‘the rural’ in a new way; he wants to subvert common understandings of rural life as, for example, clearly distinct from urban experience. Following an overview of debates about the nature of rural Thailand in the past, Rigg draws on his extensive fieldwork in Thailand to construct a multi-dimensional account of rural persistence in Thailand. What emerges is a rural that is, well, ‘more than rural’: it is linked to the city by investment, employment and aspiration; rural households are multi-sited, multi-functional and generationally fragmented; non-farm work is often dominant in the village economy; agricultural smallholdings are combined with labour diversification; land ownership is no longer an indicator of prosperity; and rural villages are now homes to factory workers, immigrants, ‘city people’ (p. 198), and even academics. Rural smallholders endure in Thailand not as farmers, but as nodes in socially and economically complex webs of livelihood and cultural expression.

This is a sophisticated and nuanced account of contemporary rural Thailand, elegantly combining scholarly viewpoints and the voices of rural people themselves. The book's chapters are theoretically and empirically rich explorations of the qualities and characters—the textures—of rural livelihoods. More than Rural is first class scholarship. However, I would have liked a little more piquancy; perhaps even a dash of polemic. The persistence of the rural smallholders in Thailand is an issue of profound political importance that underpins much of the political turbulence the country has experienced over the past 20 years. Stories of diversification, adaptability and flexibility are laudable but, as Rigg himself shows, they are interwoven with stories of inequality, frustration, exploitation and political confrontation. The subtle textures of transformation cannot conceal the underlying structural challenges. In the simplest possible terms, I would have liked a clearer insight into whether or not Rigg considers smallholder persistence to be a ‘good thing’.

A hint about Rigg's big-picture perspective comes in a short section towards the end of the book, dealing with the rural transition from ‘vulnerability to precarity’. Rural people are no longer at risk of outright subsistence failure, as they were in the past, but their livelihoods are now precarious, largely as a result of their heavy reliance on informal employment. By Rigg's account, the informal sector made up 64 per cent of the workforce in 2013 (p. 188). Put simply, it looks like Thailand's economy has developed in a way that has not been able to provide secure employment for the rural population and draw them securely and permanently out of relatively low value (in economic terms) agricultural livelihoods. This is an important insight, but I am not sure where Rigg wants to take it. He is critical of ‘productivist’ (p. 225) approaches to rural Thailand, but plenty of his data appear to show that persistent (and worsening) inequality is the result of the relatively low productivity of both the agricultural and informal sector pursuits that so many rural people rely on. Similarly Rigg is critical of the Thai state's development project as being based on a ‘deficiency mind set’ (p. 75), but I am not sure if he feels that the state should have done more, or less, to drive a thoroughgoing agrarian transition.

These are big-picture structural issues and dealing with them may, indeed, require more thoroughgoing grappling with the grand narratives and theoretical models of economic development. Rigg has done a superb job on the varied textures of transformation but his critical evaluation of the trajectory of transformation is a little underdone.