Rural Society,the State and Social Capital in Eastern India: A Critical Investigation

This paper considers two questions. First, what was the course of social differentiation in Aberdeenshire in the agricultural revolution? Second, why did peasants in the county survive the strong differentiating pressures of the mid‐nineteenth century? We find that as late as 1870 Aberdeenshire had only a semi‐proletariat; the agricultural working class was still rooted in the peasantry. The reasons for the failure to complete primitive accumulation are located in the concrete nature of capitalist agricultural production in nineteenth‐century Aberdeenshire.