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against Scott, namely that the balance of exchange hardlyever gives peasants anything close to fair value for whatthey give patrons. Bu t much of the time Popkin blurs thethree levels into one: "Moral economists assume a fixed,culturally given subsistence levol (target income)." 17 Hewrites as if the moral economists in general were saying thatpre-capitalist societies provided th t peasants a subsistence,and the peasants had no desire for any higher level of

income. Even if a plague create d a serious labor shortage,they would not try to exploit their increased bargainingpower. 18 (The real Scott, as distinguished from the mythical moral economist, specifically mentions the tensionswhich arose when European peasants demanded a higherprice for their labor after the Black Death of the Fourteenth Century.19 ) At several points Popkin claims themoral economists expect patrons to be benevolent evenwhen it violates their self-interest. Lords would care moreabout improving the general welfare than about maintaining the ir own control of the peasants, and treat all impartially instead of playing off one peasant against another.Village leaders would not exploit their positions for personal gain. 20

Scott gives tremendous emphasis to the relative bargaining power of rich and poor; the idea that capitalistmarkets an d colonial governments weaken the peasants'position is central to his analysis of modem history. Popkinat some points acknowledges this fact, but at many othershe suggests the moral economists are denying that relativepower determines behavior.

The bulk of Popkin's book is an analysis of changes inthe Vietnamese village from the French conquest up toabout 1950. He discusses shifts in village administrativestructures and tax policies, differentiating between regionsan d also distinguishing the patterns specified in law fromwhat actually happened in the villages. He considers the

way a variety of organizations-Catholic, Hoa Hao, CaoDai and Viet Minh-garnered support from the peasantslargely by protecting them against abuse by rural elites. Forthe early colonial period he works mainly from French andEnglish language materials; later on he relies more oninterviews conducted in Vietnam, and on some publishedmaterials in Vietnamese.

This is considerably better than the introductorychapters. I t also does not show total disagreement with themoral economists. On e is especially struck, after the wayPopkin has trea ted the moral economists' hostility towardthe market as on e of the main things which differentiatesthem from his own school, to see him describing howVietnamese peasants were forced into the market in the

early twentieth century, against their will and under conditions which made this a disaster for them. 21

The differences between Scott and Popkin are in somerespects smaller than Popkin has suggested, but they arestill significant. For example, Scott does believe that elite

17. Popkin. p. 72. There is a similar misunderstanding in Adas. p. 526.18. Ihid, pp. 72-73.19. Scott, Moral Ecol1omy. p. 161n.20. Popkin, pp. 74,77,58-59.21. Ibid, p. 148.

behavior in many situations, including pre-colonial Vietnam, was more considerate of peasant interests thanPopkin believes it was. Popkin doubts tha t the "implicitbargaining processes" described above exist on any largescale; that one villager will give something to another withou t an exactly defined return. He also makes a rather goodargument that the moral economists exaggerate the benefits traditional villages provided their residents, by neglect

ing th e fact that some of the people physically residing insuch villages were treated as outsiders, and denied thebenefits accorded to members of the community.

On a deeper level, while Popkin emphasizes tha t economic power begets political power and vice versa, he discusses a considerable variety of issues as if there were nointeraction betwe en economics and other aspects of humanlife. His initial two chapters, in which he lays out his generalpicture of village society, barely acknowledge the possibility that there might exist people who allow their behavior tobe influenced by a desire to be liked or respected. Giventhe highly personalized nature of many village societies,this ommision 22 is extraordinary. He deprecates transfersof wealth through transactions which are on the surfacesocial events, such as feasts given by powerful individuals.He assumes that the only thing a peasant or a small group ofpeasants can do to express their displeasure toward anexcessively greedy landlord is to refuse to rent land fromhim, an d since he is mainly interested in societies wherethere will always be other peasants available, a small groupof peasants appears to have no weapon whatever to useagainst the landlords. Where the moral economists seeconsiderable variation in the bargaining power of the peasants, and quite considerable power in many traditionalsocieties, Popkin paints a relatively uniform picture of thepowerlessness of un-organized peasants. " ... he ability oftenants to hold a lord to a particular standard will dependon th e ability ofthe group to act in concert ... " 2 3

This must be accounted one of his most serious errors.While it is true (as Scott explicitly acknowledges)24 thatsome of the problems peasants have faced in the twentiethcentury can be solved only by modem mass organizations,the more primitive techniques of the "little tradition" havealso had their successes. Peasants must organize if they areto hold a lord to a standard which will satisfy Popkin, butPopkin's standards are high. He has no interest in-virtually denies the existence of -e i ther the more modestgoals which unorganized peasants can hope to reach, orth e methods they use to reach them. This is one of the mainreasons he misunderstands the moral economists so badly:when they say that the institutions of the traditional villageprovided certain benefits to the peasants, he interprets thisas a claim that the village provided benefits as great and asvaried as those provided by the much larger and moresophist icated organizations with which he is concerned.

* * *Popkin sees people joining revolutionary movements,

or quasi-political groups such as the Cao Dai, Hoa Hao,

22. Particularly conspicuous on pp. 57-58.23. Popkin, p. 27.24. Scott, Moral Economy, p. 3.

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an d Catholic organizations in Vietnam, primarily becausethere are certain benefits they will get if and only if theysupport the organization. To some lesser extent they maygive support on an idealistic basis if the movement benefitsth e community as a whole, without there being any directlink between contributions by an individual and rewards tothat individual. Scott on the othe r hand approaches peasan t rebelliousness as a product of the outrage and /or des

peration peasants feel when the actions (or in some casesinaction) of the elite threaten the peasants' minimal subsistence needs.

These two analyses are not so much disagreeing asdiscussing different phenomena. Popkin is concerned withhow it is that revolutionary movements (or heavily politicized religious movements, which make good comparative cases), gain long term peasant support. The Viet Minh,Catholic, Ho a Ha o and Cao Dai organizations were all ableto win large and tenacious followings. Scott explicitly denies that the main part of his book is aimed at explainingthese phenomena. He is concerned , rather, with what peasants do, think and feel in the absence of any powerfulrevolutionary organization. Surely this is an importantquestion; the existence of a serious revolutionary movement is the exception rather than the rule in peasant society. Whe n Scott looks at unsuccessful rebellions it is not somuch for what they have in common with real revolutions,as for the light they shed on what the peasants were thinking during periods of peace.

I f we ask why peasants joined the Viet Minh in 1948,the plausible answer is tha t it was in their interests to do so.Peasant participation in quite hopeless affairs like theBurmese and Vietnamese rebellions of 1930 requires amore complex explanation. Either the peasants made agrotesque miscalculation of the odds, or they were (as Scottsuggests) guided more by rage at cu rrent conditions than byany cool evaluation of the chances for improvement. Rational self-interest is a tenable explanation for participationonly in movements which actually benefitted theirmembers.

A br ief section near the end of Scott's book discussessome of the same movements as in Popkin's, and attributesto them some of the same characteristics. The main difference is that, for Scott, the way these movements provideimmediately useful services for peasants is a point of similarity with tradit ional elites; Popkin treats this as a way theydiffer from traditional elites. Joel Migdal, who is concernedwith real revolutionary movements, is likewise very closeto Popkin in his conclusion: the peasants join becauseof the concrete benef its they can win by doing so. 2S Migdaldescribes these benefits largely in terms of healing thedamage done by modernization, while Popkin points to theway revolutionaries can solve the problems of feudalism. I ftraditional rural elites take advantage of modem institutions to abuse the peasants in ways they could not formerlyhave done, Popkin may cite this as an example of the evilsof feudalism, since it is the trad itional elite which is behaving in this fashion; moral economists will cite it among theevils of modernization.

25. Migdal, pp. 228-52. Wolf is a bit harder to characterize.

What is really needed is a comparative analysis omovements of the two types, searching for the overlaps inmotivation patterns. Support for the hopeless rebellionsmust usually have involved at least some element oftional calculation, either a misguided belief that the revolthad some chance of success, or an assumption tha t it did nohave to succeed-that even an unsuccessful uprising wouldchasten the ruling class and cause it to restrain its behavior.

When the government of China destroyed the Communistbase area in Jiangxi Province in 1934, for instance, manpeasan ts who had supported the Communists were killed.However, the degree of inequality in landholdings whichha d existed before the Communists arrived was not rstored, so peasants who lived through the counter-revolution might still have felt that the revolutionary effort hadbeen on balance a good thing. Some Luzon peasants definitely gave the Hukbalahap movement, despite its defeat,credit for having caused a modest reduction in levelsrent. 26 To what extent do peasants consider such possibilities in advance? On the o ther hand, when peasants werefinally presented with movements offering a genuinechance of success, one can hardly suppose that they droppe d instantaneously all the attitudes which had formerlymade them or people like them, willing to support thehopeless movements. Even very powerful revolutionarymovements (such as those led by Communist parties inChina and Vietnam), which could make a plausible appealto the peasants in terms of rational self-interest, have notlimited themselves to this approach. They have also appealed to the type of indignation which had fueled peasantprot ests in earli er days.

Both Scott and Popkin port ray peasant economic behavior as essentially rational; indeed each believes that heis attributing greater rationality to the peasants than doesthe other. They disagree as to whether a rational peasantwould like or dislike involvement in a market economy.Both sides are perhaps going overboard in their desire avoid insulting or patronizing peasants. A scholar whodescribes this or that behavior pattern as irrational or foish simply because he has not thought through the realsituation of the people he is describing, or because thscholar (who assumes his own behavior to be perfectlyratio nal) would have done something different, may properly be criticized. But if we can put aside for a moment fearsof appearing racist or arrogant, it will become apparentthat people of almost every culture frequently misjudgetheir situat ion. We would laugh at anyone who tried to tellus that Americans, who have had decades of experienwith th e market economy, all understand the relativemerits of market and non-market economies, and neverallow their behavior in the market to be influencedfoolish hopes and fears or by misleading television advertisements. Vietnamese peasants of the early twentieth century , recently introduced to the market, would have foundthat it fluctuated in ways they could not predict if they hadthe intelligence of Einstein and J. Paul Getty combined. Tosay that they would probably underestimate the potentialbenefits of involvement in the market, until they had sev

26. Scott & Kerkvliet, p. 261, citing Akira Takahashi.


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South Asia.The role of kings and their subadars, nawabs, ascen

dent Muslim and Hindu gentry and, finally, the BritishCompany officers and civil servants is well covered in thecontext of promoting (and sometimes demoting) the physical growth and quality of life in specific cities or sectionsthereof. However, the book in its treatment of urban environments and processes barely touches upon the phenomenon of class conflict and class control. The issue of the"power structure" and the "dominance-dependence relationships" in the context o f segregation of the city into the"colonial" and the "indigenous" parts is introduced in theopening theoretical discussion, but does not clearly resurface in the articles that follow. The authors illustratewell the fact that during the Mughal rule and its 18th and19th century remnants under the Nawabs of Oudh andBengal the rich lived in and around the palace complexes.These were the areas where prestige buildings, kothis of theservice gentry, and spacious gardens were built. Later theBritish built their exclusive civil lines and cantonmentseither close to these areas or in separate parts of the city.

Trade and commerce took place in crowded walled citiesand ganje s. * In recent times many of the old prestige buildings and kothis are found in ruins, while the walled citiesand ganjes either became more crowded or were reclaimedfor newer housing and bazaars, depending upon thechanges affecting a given city. Thus the whole city of Kara,near Allahabad, declined while large parts of old Lucknowand Dacca were rejuvenated.

The decline of old cities, with the disintegration of theMughal and Nawabi rule and rise in the political and economic power of the British raj, had far-reaching consequences for the traditional urban gentry, prestigious kinship groups, higher castes and privileged religious communities. The desperate struggles of these groups to main

tain their socio-economic positions in the face of rapidpolitical changes and "modernization" is depicted vividlyin the book. What is missing largely is information on thelife and struggles of the working classes and the morphology of their quarters. There are occasional references tothese inhabitants in the context of squalid conditions ofpoverty and insanitation. Thus a British visitor to Lucknowin 1798 is quoted as: "Happening to enter the town at thewest end, and which contains the poor mechanics andlabourers of every sort, I never witnessed so many forms ofwretchedness, filth and vice .... "

Th e British colonial authorities were insensitive to theneeds of urban masses for proper municipal services andpublic utilities, as, demonstrated in articles on Dacca and

Allahabad. I t was only by the middle ofthe 19th century,when the British established their stronghold in most of thesubcontinent and the nature of contagious epidemic diseases became bette r known that the South Asian city beganto receive its modern public utilities, first in the sectors ofEuropean residence and work and subsequently, on adiminishing scale, in the quarters of the native servicegentry, the muhallas of the artisan and the trading families,

* Th e Gall} broadly means a "place" known for a specific industrial orcommercial activity, bu t including the living quar ters of local and itine rantproducers and traders.

finally coming to an end at the encroachments, shanttowns and the mud huts of the laboring classes. Yet, thblessings of modern utilities and sanitation depended onthe manual work of the laboring classes who installed andmaintained electricity poles, filled the infested ditches andswamps, swept the streets and carried out the night soil.Th e Company government in Bengal could not even affordthe pitiful wages of ordinary laborers, and convicts wereused to sanitize the city of Dacca and to clear the junglearound it where the modern suburbs, the race course andthe cantonment stand today. In short, the real builders ofthe South Asian city remain faceless.

Speaking of builders, I am reminded of the commenmade by a guide during my childhood visit to the palacecomplex of the Lucknow Nawabs. There was a saying, hesaid, about the generosity of Nawab Shuga-ud-Daula:

l i se na de Moula, Use de Shuja-ud-Daula.(One who is denied by the Lord is provided by Shu ja-uDaula.)

Th e Nawab, he said, hired ordinary workers to build his

palace during the day and employed the fallen gentry atnight to demolish it. (The workers still came ahead!)On the whole, the book is a valuable addition to th

scarce literature on South Asian cities, and the qualitativemethodology adop ted by the authors makes it possible todeal with a variety of important issues concerning urban lifean d morphology in the region. *

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Review

by AI FleischmanReference guides of this caliber should be available for

all areas or continents. Africa and the Middle East are twoareas of utmost need; South America is not far behind.Readers of this review should request their local collegeand even large public library to acquire the works.

In some sense, Raymond Nunn's work is like a gourmet cookbook. I t tempts the readers with mouth-wateringsources of information, yet the researcher may often befrustrated in trying to track down the actual ingredient orbook. Mr. Nunn notes that he has personally examinedevery work; I have not. Unless a scholar is fairly sure ofobtaining these works at a large university research libraryhe will find the library labryinth can be a large waste of timeand energy.

The reference works that Mr. N unn considers relate toa specific area/country: encyclopedias, handbooks, yearbooks, directories, atlases, gazeteers, bibliographies, biographical dictionaries, census reports, dictionaries. Acloser look at the atlas listings reveals many significantatlases were not included, perhaps by choice. A usefulgeneral reference would have been International Maps andAtlases in Print 2nd ed. (1976) which lists both maps andatlases. Fo r Bangladesh, a small, data type, computer atlaswas published in 1972. There is another tiny atlas, not doneby a computer, for Nepal (1966). Kampuchea (Cambodia)and Vietnam both have provincial atlases. Fo r India, Iwould suggest India in Maps, 1976, and for Sri Lanka to thesouth, a Concise Atlas o/Ceylon.

Almost all the items cited by Mr. Nunn are standardreference works, none of which will make the best sellerlist. We see endless names in telephone directories, butrealize we can never really know all those people. The sameis true with items in bibliographies. We are soon swimming

in oceans of data which touch the shores of past and futurecenturies. Who is responsible for acquiring, reading, andunderstanding the events taking place? One notes thateven in a journal of concerned scholars barely an article onBangladesh has appeared in the decade between 1970 and1980. How does one learn about important issues in thesearea/countries? Who has reviewed Needless Hunger: VoicesFrom a Bangladesh Village which attempts to explain whypeople are starving in one of Asia's most potentially fertilelands? Nunn's book does/does not give one an easy startingplace. Although it is necessary to understand the past, mostof the references cited, at least for Bangladesh, are fiveyears old. The image of Bangladesh is one of poverty,

ASIA: REFERENCE WORKS; A SELECT ANNO-TATED GUIDE by G. Raymond Nunn. London:Mansell , 1980, 365pp., index, $55

AMERICA IN ASIA: RESEARCH GUIDES ONUNITED STATES ECONOMICS IN PACIFICASIA. Hong Kong: Asia/North America Communications Center, 1979. (Pagination, indexing and pricear e all variable). An individual can purchase a copyfor $16 airmail, a business $51, or the publication canbe purchased in sections.

needless hunger, rampant disease, threats of genocide. YetI noted in the N. Y. Times (Aug. 30, 1980) that the country isgoing to build a nuclear plant. Kurian's Book of WorldRankings lists Bangladesh with three-quar ters of its population living in absolute poverty, the only Asian nation alongside nineteen African countries.

In using Asia, the best approach is first to read aboutth e desired country, followed by the region. The authortitle index is helpful, but many times one searches for a keyword and fails to find the particular item. W. Eric Gustafson's Pakistan and Bangladesh: Bibliographic Essays in SocialScience, 1976, can not be found in the index under Bangladesh, no r does a "see reference" appear for this entryunder Bangladesh in the main section of the book. Asub ject, preferably a key word index in the rear, would be amost useful addition in the next revision. How many bibliographies pertaining to ethnology are included in Nunn?We do no t know.

Index to Indian Legal Periodicals is placed under subjectbibliography rather than India-Periodicals-Indexes. Thearrangements of works in the bibliographical section, andin most others as well, is neither chronological nor alphabetical. Works are placed in an arbitrary and confusingorder. On page 44, item C 167 is titled Index to IndianEconomic Journals. Two pages later, page 46, item C 181 istitled Index 0/Indian Economic Journals, /9/6- /965. I t wouldhave been much easier for the reader/researcher if theseclosely related items were placed next to each other. Thus itis necessary to read each individual item.

Tr y locating materials pertaining to the nations/statesof Afgani stan (C44), Bhutan (C46) , Ladakh (C241). Theremayor may not be other entries pertaining to these countries, bu t these place names can not be located in the

author-title index. Afghanistanis

mentioned in at least oneannotation; thus, I believe key words in the annotationsshould be indexed.

Probably many readers of the Bulletin are aware of theexistence of America in Asia: Research Guide/s (one book)on United States Activity in Pacific Asia. Dry material is oftenpresented in a scholarly-folk style. This alternative or progressive research guide, however, helps the researcher delveinto the doings of corporate America/Asia.

Al A rightly, considers itself to be a research publication in the ilk of the decade-old NACLA Research Methodol-ogy Guide (1970), as well as a pair of organizations which


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specialize in sources on "the nature and dynamics of thecorporate system." The book, which is made up of anindividual booklet for each nation covered, is designed asan aid to progressive groups seeking sources for an analysisof U.S. economic, military and political involvement inmodern Asia. This resource center in Hong Kong maintains files and a clipping service in its library similar to theservices offered by the Data Center, Oakland, CA. Byreading th e solid annotat ions in the volume researchers canlearn about th e great variety of documentation which isavailable from a wide array of insititutions. For example,th e Clearing House for Social Development in Asia has adirectory useful for determining which U.S. organizationsan d academic institutions various Asian groups exchangeinformation with. While Nunn concentrates solely onprinted sources of material, AlA includes organizations,groups, corporations, news services, private reports andlibraries. Th e format of AlA takes a littles getting used to asit appears to be arranged to aid the use of either type ofresource individually. Th e prime purpose of this researchguide is to widen the circle of "those who can be effectivelycritical of America' s power in Asia."

Scholars may still prefer Nunn even with some of theshortcomings mentioned elsewhere in this review. Nunncontains a broader subject coverage for a larger number ofAsian nations. His chronological coverage is also greater .Bu t using both works the researchers can shape an evenstronger tool. America in Asia (AlA) is not included in Nunn,as it probably appeared a trifle too l a t e -an unfortunateoccurrence-but it would be difficult to detect what a gemthis is from Nunn 's even-handed annotations.

Let us look closer at how the two reference works, ifused together, help form a more complete picture forMalaysia. Nunn starts off with an area handbook. AlA only

ment ions this series in its Asian overview so a reader referring te-a specific country is likely to overlook the item. Bothautho rs agree the handbooks usually provide an excellentand an extensive introductory bibliography without annotations. Next, Nunn includes mention of a Malaysian almanac, no t listed in AlA. Th e annotation reveals the wotkcontains a directory of Malaysian national organizationsan d a fairly cu rrent source of biographical information onimportant government officials. On the next page ofNunn,th e researcher discovers an even superior biographicalsource, a "who's who"-type work for Malaysia. An important business directory does not appear in AlA. Nunnshould receive blessings from researchers for recognizingth e importance of census data and he does include refer

ences to them whenever possible. Unfortunately, AlA doesno t make use ofthis.Moving on to the element of statistics, the better

coverage an d more useful information comes from AlA. AlAnow begins to dig deeper and deeper into the business,foreign trade an d investment areas. Nunn turns to selectedbibliographies. A useful bibliography for AlA to have notedwould be the Guide to References Sources on Industrial Development in Malaysia. An d so it goes, nation after nation.

A sampling of items from Nunn includes:(1) A Bibliography of Bibliographies on India (1,243

items) 1975. C 58(2) Indian Political Movement, a Systematic Bibliog

raphy, 1919-1971 (6,564 items) 1976. C 189(3) Indira Gandhi: A Select Bibliography (3,247 ite

1976. C228(4) Andhra Pradesh: A Select Bibliography. /962-/975.

(2,687 items) 1975. C 237(5) Anthropology in Indonesia (900+ items) 1975. J(6) Martial Law in the Philippines (1,000 items) 1

M95

(7) Vietnam: A Guild to Reference Sources (1,400 ite1977.01

(8) China: An Annotated Bibliography of Bibliograph(2,500 items) 1978. Q 97

(9) Japan English Magazine Directory (788 items) 1R 113

Nunn neglects to cover-o r he hides away-clippinservices (Asia Monitor) and makes no mention of compdata bases. Little attention is given to such key areas health care, demography, enviromental problems,business. Important reference works have been left outNunn: Asia Corporate Profiles and National Finance, YellowPages o f the Japan Telephone Book, Bankers Handbooks forAsia.

Among the pluses for Mr. Nunn is just the shundertaking of the project which will surely help future researchers. Nunn makes use of acquisition lists. The wohas a convenient numbering system whereby each item,once known, can be found quickly. I t is recommended tthe library of your choice acquire a copy of both books.

CorrespondenceTo th e Editors:

In my recent review essay concerning China after therevolution, I included some personal remarks about

Orvil le Schell. Such remarks were unfair and uncalled for. Iapologize to Orville Schell. Given the great efforts Buleditors have made to keep serious disagreements fromappearing as personal or sectarian squabbles, I regret doinanything that might weaken that principled Bcommitment.

Sincerely,

Edward Friedma

Books to ReviewThe following review copies have arrived at the office oBulletin. I f you are interested in reading and reviewing one omore o f them, write to Joe Moore, BeAS, P.O. Box R, Beroud, CO 805/3. This is not, of course, an exhaustive list oavailable books in print-only a list of books received.welcome reviews of other worthy volumes not listed here.Laurence Binyon: Asiatic Arts (Humanities Press, 198 I) .John H. Barton and Ryukichi Imai (eds.): Arms Contro ll!: A New Approach

International Security (Oelgeschlager, Gunn & Hain, 1981).Edwin G. Clausen and Jack Bermingham (eds.): Pluralism. Racism. and Pub

Policy: The Search fo r Equality (G.K. Hall & Co., 1981).Tony Gilbert and Pierre loris: Global Interference: The Consistent Pattern

American Foreign Policy (Liberation, 1981).Wilbur Schramm and Erwin Atwood: Circulatioll of News in the Third Worl

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