Three deltas: accumulation and poverty in rural Burma, Bengal and South India

The world is richer today than it has ever been in the past, yet there are more poor people than ever before. This paradox of world poverty poses both practical and theoretical problems of a crucial nature but it is only by understanding the causes of poverty that proper remedial measures can be devised.
Commonly held notions about poverty treat it as a natural' problem of scarcity-a temporary state which will disappear once an economy grows and resources become plentiful. However, in this unique book. Prol. Willem van Schendel argues that the transition to modern mass poverty cannot be attributed simply to natural scarcity. backwardness exacerbated by population growth, or colonial capitalism, but is primarily the outcome of unequal relations between groups of people.
Prol. Van Schendel bases his conclusions on an exhaustive comparison of three rural societies in Asia between the 1750s and 1980s. Using a wealth of maternal, both published and unpublished. he provides a detailed analysis the historical development of relations of primary surplus ex traction in Lower Burma, Bengal, and the Kaveri delta in southern India.

The author's analysis reveals that these relations; which differed markedly in each of the three regions during the precolonial period, did not converge after they were in corporated into a single colony (namely, British India). After the colonial power left, stagnation and spreading mass poverty in these three deltas continued to be predicated upon quite different relations of accumulation.