Land, Labour, and Agrarian Change in Nepal's Tarai-Madhesh

Fraser Sugden is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Birmingham specialising in the political economy of agrarian and environmental change. He has written extensively on shifting class, gender and generational relations in agriculture, and their interaction with contemporary environmental, political, and economic stresses. He has conducted intensive rural fieldwork across South and East Asia, with a focus on Nepal and the Eastern Gangetic Plains and was based in this region for most of the last decade prior to joining the School.

• Acknowledgements; List of Tables; List of Figures Maps, Images; 1. Revisiting the 'Pre-capitalist'; 2. Feudalism, Capitalism and the Mode(s) of Production; 3. Morang: An Agrarian and Industrial History; 4. Conceptualising the Agrarian Class Structure; 5. Ground Rent, the Market and Debt; 6. Surplus Appropriation and its Implications for Food Security and Productivity; 7. Capitalist Expansion, Cash and Climate; 8. Revisiting Agrarian Transition in Morang; 9. Capitalism, the Pre-capitalist and the Peasantry.

'The result of intense and committed fieldwork into the transitions and transformations of agricultural and rural capitalism, of gendered work, of production and exchange, of feudal rents and relations and of local and global capitalist markets, this rich evocation of the flatland society of a mountain state is certain to inspire comparative research, debate and reflections far and wide in agrarian studies.' Barbara Harriss-White, University of Oxford