Work and control in a peasant economy : a history of the lower Tchiri Valley in Malawi, 1859-1960

Peasants in southern Africa have too often been portrayed as technologically backward, chronically underemployed, and politically passive. Such views, says Elias Mandala in this finely particularized study of the lower Tchiri Valley in Malawi, partake more of myth than reality. Peasants are first and foremost laborers, he points out, who spend most of their lives working with their hands to meet basic human needs. In making labor the center of his analysis, Mandala refocuses attention on peasants as workers, actively engaged in the effort to control their own destinies through complex forms of both resistance and accommodation. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and archival material, Mandala weaves together aspects of peasant economy usually ignored or treated separately, such as the ecological conditions of production, the division of labor between and within households, and gender and generational conflict. Frontmatter Illustrations (page ix) Figures and Tables (page xi) Acknowledgments (page xiii) Preface (page xv) Introduction: The Labor Process in African Agrarian History (page 3) Part 1: Transformations in Productive Forces 1. Major Tensions in the Political Economy of the Lower Tchiri Valley, 1859-1863 (page 15) 2. From the Slave Trade to the Rise of a Peasantry, 1859-1925 (page 66) Part 2: The Problem of Labor Control 3. Resistance to Capitalist Colonial Labor Regimes, 1875-1923 (page 101) 4. The Ultimate Compromise: Peasant Cotton Agriculture, 1907-1939 (page 133) Part 3: The Limits and Contradictions of Rural Struggle 5. Structural and Conjunctural Strains in Food Production and Supply, 1907-1960 (page 161) 6. Reactive Colonial Attempts to Restructure a Distorted Economy, 1930-1960 (page 191) 7. Constrained Peasant Initiatives and Agrarian Change, 1930-1960 (page 218) Conclusions: A Simple but Diverse Peasant World: The Lower Tchiri Valley Revisited (page 269) Notes (page 281) Bibliography (page 359) Glossary (page 379) Index (page 387) Annotation This study explores the process of the formation of a peasantry and the related problem of articulation of modes of production from the perspective of the labor process A fine copy with no markings or wear except for a noticeable small crease in the front cover. Elias C. Mandala. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 359-378) And Index.