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Anthropologists and economists have made persistent efforts to identify economic features of rural tropical economies in the simplest possible terms, in order to enhance their universality. This has resulted in the creation of doctrine on such matters as the causes of rural economic inequality and abysmal poverty. The doctrine is far too generalised to have any practical utility; it is ahistorical; and it usually involves the false belief that all cultivators in a community have similar economic responses. So firm is this orthodoxy that under-development studies have become deadlocked - to the point that our ignorance is constantly on the increase. The book represents a radical assault on prevailing orthodoxy, breaking the deadlock by insisting that we properly categorise the main types of agrarian system in the tropical world. Moreover, it practically demonstrates how to identify these important categories, and draw useful generalised conclusions about it, on the basis of detailed fieldwork in parts of northern Nigeria and south India.