The Moral Economy of the Peasant

The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia was Scott's first major book and the work that established him as a distinctive voice in political science. The book's central argument was that peasant rebellions in twentieth-century Southeast Asia — particularly in Burma and Vietnam — could not be explained by absolute poverty or simple economic deprivation. Peasants had always been poor. What triggered rebellion was not poverty as such but violations of the moral expectations that structured peasant life: the expectation that landlords would maintain customary obligations to their tenants, that the state would not extract subsistence during times of scarcity, that the reciprocities that sustained the poor through crisis would be honored. When colonial capitalism and state modernization dismantled these arrangements, the resulting rebellions were not primarily about poverty. They were about the violation of the moral framework within which poverty had previously been endurable.