A Colonial Economy in Crisis - Burma's Rice Cultivators and the World Depression of the 1930s (Hardcover)

The book challenges the orthodox argument that rural populations which had abandoned self-sufficiency to become single commodity producers, and which were therefore supposedly very vulnerable to the commodity price collapse of the 1930s Depression, did not in fact suffer as much as has been supposed. It shows how the effects of the depression 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, working imaginatively to mitigate their problems.