A study of agricultural production at the level of household, community and region : long term trends in India and China

This thesis examines agricultural production in key regions of India and China through three articles examining the relation of agricultural production to socio-economic processes that operate at household, community and provincial levels respectively. The first article studies the implications of the norms of gender seclusion and segregation for the location and contribution of women to agricultural production in the local economy. The spatial constraints imposed on women by these two norms are shown to differ in terms of specific demarcation of areas of the household, with seclusion dominating in the construction of categories of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ and segregation dominating the creation of ‘female’ and ‘male’ spaces. These categories are used to re-examine early twentieth century household survey data, from localities in the Jiangnan and the Doab. The second article focuses on the resource appropriation strategies of local elites and their consequences for the economic development of the local economy. The interactions between households within the elite groups, as well as those between the elites and other groups such as the local officials, are examined to obtain insights into the extent to which horizontal and vertical linkages contribute to the ability of the local elites to acquire political dominance in the local sphere. Vertical and horizontal linkages are studied, firstly, by drawing on new archival materials and ethnographic studies on the local sphere in the eighteenth century Jiangnan and Doab, and secondly, by situating these linkages within the larger political context of a model of patronage. The third article addresses long term trends in regional cereal production by undertaking an analysis of the statistical indicators of area, production and yields throughout India and China in the latter half of the twentieth century. The provincial trends are analysed by constructing a growth-instability typology to ascertain whether current trends in cereal production are an adequate basis for determining the future contributions of an individual province to national cereal production.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo