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Wide-ranging both historically and geographically, The Rice Economies brilliantly addresses a subject of abiding interest to anthropologists, economists, and historians as well as those concerned with development issues and Asian studies. It is the first work to formulate a logical, historical dynamic of development in Asia's rice economies up to the present day. The comparison of mechanized Western farming methods with the more labor intensive, less environmentally destructive Asian methods is of value to environmentalists and economists concerned with the need for sustainable development. In a new preface, the author reflects upon the increasing relevance of the concerns of the book to international environmental issues.

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The Rice Economies: Technology and Development in Asian Societies

University of California Press

European historical methodology has understandably been profoundly marked by the growth of capitalism, but it is doubtful to what extent models derived from Europe's highly specific experience are applicable to other parts of the world. Historians attempting to interpret Asian history find themselves wrestling with such intractable categories as 'feudalism' or 'peasants' which, despite their reassuring vagueness, rarely seem to fit the case exactly. Evading the issue entirely, one long-standing Western tradition recognises the essential 'otherness' of Asian societies by attributing to them a timelessness and unchanging quality encapsulated in the concept of the Asian Mode of Production. Others, recognising that all societies change eventually, and faced with the necessity of accounting for such awkward facts as the development of commerce and commodity production in pre-modern India and China, or industrialisation and the emergence of capitalism in Meiji Japan, have preferred to think of Asia as following basically the same path as Europe, but less successfully and less rapidly. Thus Marxist historians in China and Japan categorise a vast span of Chinese history (from about 200 BC to 1911 or 1949) as feudal, with 'sprouts of capitalism' emerging intermittently during the past four or five centuries but withering before they bore fruit (see Grove and Esherick 1980; Brook 1981). Non-Marxist historians too, especially when explaining the failure to develop capitalism (or the contrary in the case of Japan), usually measure off Asian societies point for point against a European model of development, to see where they are lacking (Elvin 1973; Tang 1979; Yamamura 1979; Jones 1981).

Both of these methods are essentially negative, the one denying the occurrence of any significant change, the other obscuring the specificity

of non-European societies. If we look only for what is typical of Europe, the significant features of a less familiar society may simply escape our notice. Over the last four centuries European society has been completely transformed, and advanced capitalism has accustomed us to a breakneck pace of change. By comparison it is not surprising that Asian societies seem to have stood still. Yet where adequate documents exist it is not difficult to show that in Asian societies too the forces of production were expanded and relations of production transformed—though not always in the way one might expect. The difficulty lies in accounting for the nature of such changes: if the dynamics of change differ from those we have identified as operating in European history, then it is not surprising that our traditional models fail adequately to interpret change in non-European societies, or even to acknowledge its existence.

While it is easy to appreciate that eurocentric models will generally prove inadequate to explain the evolution of non-European societies, it is not so easy to construct appropriate alternatives. One important obstacle is our failure (in the main) to recognise the relativity of our conception of technological progress. Changes in technology are clearly one key to explicating economic history, though of course there is considerable debate as to the exact degree to which technological development determines, affects, or is simply an expression of changes in the social formation. But what exactly constitutes technological development? Here all our doubts seem to evaporate. Philosophers like Gehlen (1965) and Habermas (1971) have pointed out the immanent connection between the contemporary evaluation of technology and the 'rationality' (in the Weberian sense) that prevails in capitalist society. To be more specific, in a society where relatively scarce and expensive wage-labour is the basis of production, technical progress is largely evaluated in terms of efficiency in replacing labour. Yet this highly specific model of technological advance is generally presumed to be universal in its application. Although one can easily envisage situations in which different criteria might apply, little attempt has been made to hypothesise alternative paths of technological development or to examine the social and economic implications of such differences.

If we consider the case of agriculture, we find that technological progress is generally construed as a sequence from primitive tools like digging-sticks or hoes to more complex instruments like ploughs or harrows, culminating in the mechanical sophistication of tractors, combine-harvesters and crop-spraying aeroplanes. To this one would add the application of scientific methods to such agricultural procedures as crop selection, nutrition and weeding, resulting in the laboratory breeding of new crop strains with desirable characteristics, and the

industrial production of chemical fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides. 'Progress' seems to lie chiefly in the increasingly efficient substitution of alternative forms of energy for human labour. Now labour-saving changes in agriculture have three possible effects: first, they may enable the same number of workers to bring larger areas of land under cultivation; secondly, they may enable the same area to be cultivated by fewer workers, thus liberating the surplus labour for some other employment; and thirdly, they may allow the same area of land to be more intensively cultivated without increasing the number of workers.

The first type of change is of particular importance where land is plentiful and labour scarce, as it has been in much of the New World; it is not surprising, for example, that it was in underpopulated Australia and the United States, as the world market for wheat expanded in the later nineteenth century, that the reaper-binder and the combine-harvester were developed (Jones 1979). The second type of change is important where labour is in high demand, scarce and expensive, as was the case in Europe in the early stages of the development of capitalism. As Boserup (1981: 99) says: 'There was usually keen competition for scarce labour [between agriculture and manufactures], and most often agriculture lost in this competition. Nothing could be more inappropriate than to characterise the European economy in this period as a labour surplus economy. On the contrary, one of the most serious problems in the period of pre-industrial urbanisation in Western and Central Europe was insufficiency of food production, due not to shortage of land, but to shortage of labour.' In fact in the early stages of the 'Agricultural Revolution' demands for labour generally grew, as cropping frequency increased and as techniques became more intensive in response to the greater demand for agricultural produce (Chambers 1967). At first the greater demand for agricultural labour could be accommodated by population increase, but as industrialisation advanced and the competition for labour grew, it became both necessary and (given advances in engineering and design) possible to develop labour-saving agricultural machinery such as the multiple-furrow plough, patent seed-drills, threshers and so on.

Changes of the third type are particularly valuable where land is in short supply; they do not necessarily displace labour but may increase its effectiveness by eliminating bottlenecks or performing tasks more...