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Barriers to Economic Development in Traditional Societies: Malabar, A Case Study*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

Thomas W. Shea Jr
Thomas W. Shea Jr
Affiliation:
Dhahran, Saudi Arabia
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Extract

The district of Malabar on the Southwest coast of India has been a major exporter of a wide variety of agricultural products to Europe for more than two thousand years. Despite the two millenia of sustained contact between agricultural producers and merchants, however, social relationships in land are, even today, of a predominantly feudal character; cultivation techniques are generally primitive, and the rural portion of the district, notwithstanding the great commercial importance of its produce, appears to be surprisingly impoverished. How could the social and economic organization of a people so long exposed to the influence of world market activity remain so little affected by the currents of economic change and development in the outside world? The purpose of this article is to explore, by the study of this extreme example, the reasons for the apparent failure of a pattern of sustained economic growth to become established in a rural area exposed to continuing commercial influences.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 19 , Issue 4 , December 1959 , pp. 504 - 522
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1959

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References

1 Boeke, H. H., Economics and Economic Policy of Dual Societies (New York: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1953)Google Scholar; hereinafter cited as Dual Societies. For a somewhat different use of the term “dualism” with more evidence of economic sophistication see Hirshman, A. O., “Industrial Policy and ‘Dualism’ in Underdeveloped Countries” American Economic Review, XLVII (Sept. 1953), 550–71Google Scholar, and S. P. Schatz, “Inflation in Underdeveloped Areas,” Ibid., pp. 571–94

2 See especially Weber's, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, T., Parsons, ed. (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1947)Google Scholar, hereinafter cited as Theory; Rostow, W. W., The Process of Economic Growth (New York: W. W. Norton, 1952)Google Scholar; and ldquo;The Take-off Into Self-Sustained Growth,” The Economic Journal, LXVI (Mar. 1956), 25–48.Google Scholar

3 Adam Smith and the early classicists devoted much attention to an analysis of the restrictive influence of mercantilist institutions on economic development. The Marxists and the Institutionalists concentrated heavily on analyses of barriers to economic progress accompanying the emergence of industrial society. For the “barriers” approach in underdeveloped areas see especially Myrdal, Gunnar, Rich Lands And Poor (New York: Harper 1957), esp. pp. 30–31 and chapter xiGoogle Scholar; Hoselitz, Bert, “Non-economic Factors in Economic Development,” American Economic Review, XLVII (May 1957), 28–41Google Scholar, and “Non-economic Barriers to Economic Development,” Economic Development and Cultural Change (Mar. 1952), and Thorner, Daniel, The Agrarian Prospect in India (Delhi: Delhi University Press, 1956).Google Scholar

4 Considerable progress has been made by sociologists in devising questionnaires designed to reveal whether latent community attitude-structures are favorable to or opposed to “modernism.” One school of research (see Lerner, Daniel, The Passing of Traditional Society (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1958) employs five indicators of modernism: literacy rates, degree of mass-media participation (measured by the proportion of the population owning or listening to radios, attending cinemas, and reading newspapers), urbanization, political participation, and “empathy.” Scores on the last indicator, which is a measure of die degree of mobility, mental alertness, and socio-economic flexibility, are determined on the basis of responses to questions designed to reveal the respondents' freedom from the “thought-controls” of tradition. The most recent contribution in this field is the work of David C. McClelland of Harvard, who has devised a series of simple psychological tests designed to measure “achievement motivation” in individuals from tradition-oriented societies. On the basis of test scores he ranks individuals' capacities for entrepreneurial behavior.Google Scholar

5 There are many standard works by anthropologists and administrators which make extensive reference to caste in Malabar. Particularly worthy of citation are: Panikkar, T. K. Gopal, Malabar and Its Folk (Madras: Natesan and Co., 1900)Google Scholar, which in addition to its factual information provides a valuable insight into the thought of Western-educated Malayalis on social problems during the time preceding the break up of traditional social organization; Logan, Wm., Malabar (Vol. I, Madras: reprinted by the Gov't. Press, 1951)Google Scholar, ch. ii; Thurston, E.,. Castes and Tribes of Southern India, (7 Vols.) (Madras: Gov't. Press, 1909)Google Scholar; Madras District Gazetteers, Sir Innes, Charles A., Malabar Madras; Gov't. Press, 1951)Google Scholar, ch. iii; and E. Kathleen Gough, “Changing Kinship Usages in the Setting of Political and Economic Change among the Nayars of Malabar,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (London), LXXIII, 71–88.

6 Koya, N. Ahmed, The Year Book and Who's Who in Malabar, 1954 (Kozhikode: Adna Co. 1954).Google Scholar

7 A more detailed account of the political structure of pre-British Malabar is contained in the author's unpublished paper Agrarian Politics and Land Reform in India—Malabar District, a Case Study (Philadelphia: 1956), pp. 15–42.

8 The role of land tenure in the historical evolution of agriculture in Malabar forms the subject matter of the author's The Land Tenure Structure of Malabar and its Influence upon Capital Formation in Agriculture (Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1959).

9 Superior rightholders, for example, customarily granted special development leases guaranteeing the cultivator rent-free tenure to undeveloped land for an extended period in order to facilitate the clearing of the jungle and the planting of coconut groves, pepper gardens, and other commercial crops which required long and costly pre-production waiting periods. There were also provisions in customary law for compensatory payments to evicted tenants for improvements made during the period of tenure, although these became hopelessly inadequate following the inflationary pressures built up during British rule. See the author's thesis, ch. iv, for a detailed analysis.

10 T. W. Shea, unpublished thesis, p. 157.

11 Two offsetting mechanisms were at work:

  1. a)

    a) The long run effect of British rule was to reduce caste discrimination and occupational immobility; these were byproducts of improvements in communications and an increase in massmedia participation.

  2. b)

    b) The immediate effects of court decisions giving janmis freehold title were to reduce all or nearly all leases with vague or unspecified time periods to tenures at will. Since the effects of court decisions on tenure were more immediate than the gradual weakening of caste, the Moslem and low-caste Hindu cultivators were the net losers. Also, the janmis acquired a net increment of rights over their prime rivals, the assertive Moslem commercial outgroups, who, when landholders, were usually intermediaries rather than janmis.

12 The retarding effects of subinfeudation and subdivision of holdings on economic development have been enhanced in recent times because of the impact of rapid population growth.

13 It is significant that the European managed plantations were confined almost exclusively to hitherto unleased and sparsely populated land in the foothills and mountains of the district.

14 One adverse effect of increased subdivision of cultivators' holdings in the absence of a growth of a cooperative movement is a tendency toward wasteful duplication of agricultural equipment and livestock. The effects of this duplication is well illustrated by the case of cattle. Each cultivating family seeks to own its work and milch cattle, partly for prestige reasons, and partly because of the absence of effective channels for sharing of livestock resources. As the average size of holding per family diminishes, the availability of fodder declines. Yet the demand for cattle continues to rise, calling forth an increased supply of progressively less efficient and less productive cattle; this in turn increases the number of cattle required to perform a given volume of work. A vicious circle ensues with no downward limit, save an exhaustion of subsistence requirements.

15 As concentration of cultivated holdings in Malabar appears to be low and the acreage of cultivatible but uncultivated land is apparently small, the scope for employment of additional numbers of laborers in agriculture in the future seems appallingly dim.

16 Boeke, Daul Societies, pp. 209–229. The same phenomenon is also well known to students of economic development in Eastern Europe.

17 Several market studies of cash crops in Malabar exist. See Government of India, Report on the Marketing of Coconuts and Coconut Products in India (Delhi; Manager of Publications, 1944)Google Scholar, Report of the Spices Enquiry Committee (New Delhi; Indian Council of Agricultural Research, 1953)Google Scholar, and Nambiar, K. Kunhikannan, Survey of Arecanut Crop in Indian Union, Indian Central Arecanut Committee (Ernakulam), 1949.Google Scholar

18 Weber, Theory, p. 51. See also Leibenstein, Harvey, Economic Backwardness and Economic Growth (New York: Wiley, 1957), pp. 112ff, and Boeke, Dual Societies, pp. 36–52 and 67–79 for descriptions of pre-capitalist commercial activity in contexts of transitional societies.Google Scholar