A Colonial Economy in Crisis

This book challenges the orthodox argument that rural populations which had abandoned self-sufficiency in the nineteenth century to become single commodity producers, and which were supposedly very vulnerable to the commodity price collapse of the 1930s depression, did not in fact suffer as severely as has been supposed. It shows how the effects of the depression in the Burma rice delta were complicated, varying between regions, between different kinds of economic actors, and over time, and shows how the 'victims' of the depression were not passive, but worked imaginatively to mitigate their circumstances.