Agrarian Questions: Essays in Appreciation of T.J. Byres

This collection celebrates T J Byres seminal contributions to the political economy of the agrarian question.Four essays in the volume build directly on his work and four complementary essays address peasant politics and communist strategy in North China in the 1920s; globalisation and restructuring in the Indian food industry; foreign trade as a mechanism of economic retrogression in agriculture-constrained economies; and the reasons for Chinas success and Russias failure at the end of the twentieth century. Uniting the various themes of the essays is the demonstration of the continuing vitality and relevance of a critical, historical and comparative materialist analysis of agrarian questions exemplified by the intellectual project of T J Byres and its achievements.