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 work has resulted in the creation of a body of doctrine on such matters as the causes of rural economic inequality and abysmal poverty which has hardened the arteries of our thought. The doctrine is far too generalised to have any practical utility; it is ahistorical; and it usually involves the dangerous and false belief that all cultivators in any particular community are apt to have similar economic responses. So firm is this orthodoxy (which has a wide political spectrum), so great the fear of the chaos which would result from emphasising the significance of the heterogeneity of socio-economic structures, 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: it is an attempt to break the deadlock by insisting on the prior need for the proper categorisation of the main types of agrarian system in the tropical world, which are not necessarily at all numerous. It is, moreover, a thoroughly practical demonstration of the possibilities of identifying one of these important categories and of drawing useful generalised conclusions about it, on the basis of detailed fieldwork in parts of northern Nigeria and south India.