“There are districts in which the position of the rural population is that of a man standing permanently up to the neck in water, so that even a ripple is sufficient to drown him.”Footnote ¹ With this epigraph, invoking the words of economic historian R. H. Tawney, James C. Scott launched The Moral Economy of the Peasant. His pathbreaking second book describes the social and cultural repertoires through which Southeast Asian peasantries struggled in the 1930s to dampen the ripples and torrents of political and economic change, in an effort to keep their heads above water. In the years since its publication, and despite this seemingly delimited focus, The Moral Economy of the Peasant has generated considerable ripples of its own, energizing the waters through which it has moved over the last four decades. A number of excellent reviews have delved deeply into the origins, inspiration, and impact of this work.Footnote ² Building on these, this short essay attempts to grapple with its intellectual energy, to understand something of how The Moral Economy of the Peasant became, and remains, a touchstone within and beyond the interdisciplinary field of Asian studies.

When it was first published in 1976, The Moral Economy of the Peasant spoke to a burgeoning interest in peasant politics, and its particular forms in Asia, that had been piqued during the Cold War, especially in the context of the US war in Vietnam and the establishment of communist regimes in South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos in 1975. Yet, unlike several other significant works with which it was in dialogue, The Moral Economy of the Peasant did not set out to understand the causes of peasant rebellion and resistance through a framework of class structure and struggle, but instead to perceive the substance of peasant politics through a prism that brought into focus “the nature of exploitation in peasant society as its victims are likely to see it.”Footnote ³ Invoking the notion of moral economy first used by British historian E. P. Thompson, Scott explored peasants’ “notion of economic justice and their working definition of exploitation—their view of which claims on their product were tolerable and which intolerable.”Footnote ⁴ This notion of justice, and the forms of moral economy that took shape around it, was anchored by norms of reciprocity and rights to subsistence; the breach of these conditions was key to understanding not only peasant rebellions in Burma and Vietnam, but the conditions of peasant resistance more broadly.Footnote ⁵

Upon its publication, The Moral Economy of the Peasant kindled substantive debate within Asian studies, particularly among scholars of peasant resistance. At a time when area studies was undergoing transformation, Benedict Anderson, in his review for the Journal of Asian Studies, heralded Moral Economy as the work of a true Southeast Asianist, not simply a “one-country specialist.”Footnote ⁶ Within his own discipline of political science, Scott's attention to the social and cultural foundations of peasant politics departed sharply from the growing influence of rational choice theory on studies of peasant politics and collective action.Footnote ⁷

Simultaneously, Moral Economy considerably expanded ways of understanding and studying peasant societies beyond their conventional moorings in political economy and classic agrarian studies. Placing subsistence ethics at the center of his analysis of peasant politics, Scott argued that “the closer to the subsistence threshold and the more variable (whether due to nature or to the price system) the peasant's real income, the more likely any claim will be, and will be experienced as, exploitative and menacing. The more invariable the tax is—both across seasons and peasant classes—the more likely it will constitute, sooner or later, a direct threat to subsistence routines.”Footnote ⁸ This assertion, and others that Scott developed through this work, produced a range of critical reactions, perhaps most notably Samuel Popkin's The Rational Peasant; it also sparked inquiry into the extent to which the central tenets of peasants’ moral economy might resonate in other times and places, within and outside of Asia, and whether “problems of survival form ‘the central economic dilemma’ of most peasant households.”Footnote ⁹ Springing from the claims that Scott advanced, some scholars posited alternative principles and values that animated peasants’ moral economy in Southeast Asia, while others queried Scott's analysis of the Depression rebellions in Burma, his conceptualization of moral economy, and the very category of the peasant agriculturalist.Footnote ¹⁰ Evident in the sustained and lively discussion it generated upon its publication, which continues today, is the way that The Moral Economy of the Peasant contributed to a flourishing of multidisciplinary scholarship on the agrarian condition and politics of Southeast Asian peasantries.

But the reach and relevance of The Moral Economy of the Peasant extends far beyond those domains that constituted its original focus. Drawing inspiration from the work of Thompson and from the French Annales school of historiography, The Moral Economy of the Peasant pioneered an approach to the analysis of politics based not on grand abstractions but on the careful study of quotidian experience. For instance, Scott's account of the Depression rebellions in central Vietnam and lower Burma presents a careful analysis of the ways that steep declines in wages and the price of rice, combined with unrelenting claims on households in the form of “head taxes, land rates, debts, and land rent,” pushed peasantries in these regions to the very margin of subsistence and so fomented the rebellions of the early 1930s.Footnote ¹¹ Some of Scott's abiding concerns with everyday resistance and state power were first articulated in Moral Economy and received fuller treatment in subsequent monographs.Footnote ¹² Together, they exemplify Scott's enduring and wide-ranging commitment to understanding subaltern politics.Footnote ¹³

Part of the reach and influence of The Moral Economy of the Peasant, however, is attributable to the fact that it not only speaks to those issues with which it is directly concerned—the dynamics of exploitation, resistance, and rebellion—but also gives concrete shape to broader ideas and ideals of subsistence and justice. In this respect, while the Cold War and the US war in Vietnam certainly help orient understandings of the origins and initial reception of Moral Economy, its enduring influence must also be linked to the emergence of development as an object of scholarly study, concomitant with the gathering force of national and international development regimes in the mid- to late twentieth century. To be sure, The Moral Economy of the Peasant does not engage the concept of development per se, at least on the terms that development was understood and studied in 1976. Yet by taking peasant cultivators as the focus of its study, it was, nonetheless, a bold foray into terrain that had been powerfully defined by development economists. By placing peasant subsistence at the center of his analysis, Scott addressed concerns shared by development economists (tenure and taxation, rents, wages and prices, famine and dearth, among others). But, he wrote in the preface, “the study of the moral economy of the peasantry, while it begins in the domain of economics, must end in the study of peasant culture and religion.”Footnote ¹⁴

With this, Scott charted a course for thinking in distinctly different ways about what development means and entails, and for whom. And he did so without adopting the concept of development itself, though the rebellions and protests that motivated his study of peasant politics brought into relief contradictions and contestations over subsistence and development. Scott recognized that for peasantries in Southeast Asia these contests were about more than “calories and income” but had much to do with “conceptions of social justice, of rights and obligations, of reciprocity.”Footnote ¹⁵ In this manner, The Moral Economy of the Peasant blazed a trail away from conceiving of development in terms of, for example, national income, labor supply, and real wages.

Extending beyond the study of peasant politics and subsistence ethics, then, The Moral Economy of the Peasant opened up the possibility of studying development in quite different terms: as eminently situated and relational, and as underpinned by particular (and dynamic) moral and ethical codes and obligations. In a special symposium in American Anthropologist in 2005, Marc Edelman demonstrates the relevance of Scott's formulation of moral economy for thinking about contemporary peasant movements that have arisen in response to various liberalizing and regulatory reforms to agriculture and that have more recently mobilized around struggles for food sovereignty.Footnote ¹⁶ Revisiting some of the regions in central Vietnam that informed Scott's arguments in Moral Economy, Pamela McElwee finds that reciprocity, income redistribution, and access to common lands remained key constituents of peasant moral economy in the mid-2000s. Subsistence and risk aversion continued to be paramount, as Vietnamese peasants grappled with economic liberalization brought about by the country's accession to the World Trade Organization.Footnote ¹⁷ Indeed, in research stretching across Asia, The Moral Economy of the Peasant has proven remarkably generative to think with, and against, in a range of settings that bear on the struggles and possibilities for development. These include struggles against large dams in India, community self-help in Thailand, transnational charity networks spanning Bangladesh and the United Kingdom, and food provisioning amid global food price spikes.Footnote ¹⁸ In trying to grasp why moral economy has acquired such resonance in diverse development imaginations, it is worth recalling the context in which the term was first used. Citing Thompson, Edelman reminds us that early use of the term moral economy can be attributed to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century working-class Chartist movement in Great Britain, which used it to contest influential precepts of classical political economy. Footnote ¹⁹ In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, moral economy has often gained traction as a counterweight to contemporary neoliberalism.

As a result of the wide currency it has acquired in recent decades, however, one may ask whether the concept of moral economy retains its analytical force. Several scholars have recently noted the wide array of ways (extending well beyond the scope of this essay) in which it has been used.Footnote ²⁰ Some have argued that this breadth has rendered the term almost meaningless, blunting its conceptual power.Footnote ²¹ Several of these works take steps to delineate the ways in which the term has been adopted, with a view to reviving its analytical edge. Jaime Palomera and Theodora Vetta, for example, have noted the currency it has acquired in the study of solidarity economies and exchange practices that operate outside the standard sites of market transactions.Footnote ²² James Carrier has sought to leverage the concept to direct analytical attention on the way in which all economic activity is in some way relational, while Didier Fassin places emphasis on the production and circulation of moral sentiments.Footnote ²³ In doing so, these accounts considerably extend the concept of moral economy beyond the ways it was initially developed in The Moral Economy of the Peasant and, earlier still, in the work of Thompson.

Palomera and Vetta have sought to further articulate the links between moral economy and capital accumulation. They write, “the structural inequalities generated by particular forms of capital accumulation—mediated by particular kinds of state regulation—are always metabolized through particular fields constituted by dynamic combinations of norms, meanings and practices. It is these fields that we call moral economies. They can reproduce or strengthen patterns of capital accumulation that regulate social structure, but they can also alter and even short-circuit them.”Footnote ²⁴ This rendering of moral economy is arguably more faithful to the concept of moral economy articulated in The Moral Economy of the Peasant. Inasmuch as Scott calls forth the concept of moral economy to understand resistance to the depredations of the colonial state and the world market in Southeast Asia, he does not offer a romantic portrayal of egalitarian peasant utopia. Rather, notions of moral economy are predicated on, and refracted through, forms of social and economic inequality, and associated systems of hierarchy and subordination. Peasant notions of justice take shape within—not outside—these parameters and may thus help to reproduce and sustain them.

In this context, it is worth asking how the analysis of, and approach to, exploitation and justice that Scott pursued in Moral Economy may help shape or sharpen analysis of inequality and precarity as it is experienced in the world today. Indeed, if “reliable subsistence” remains an important “primordial goal,” then present-day precarity necessarily threatens it. Recalling the quotation that opens The Moral Economy of the Peasant, one might think of precarity as the condition of standing up to one's neck in water, of being vulnerable to drowning by a ripple. Though it has acquired currency in academic and popular discourse only in recent years, Scott recognized precariousness as a key element of peasant politics, writing that “we may learn more about the politics of peasants by asking not merely how poor they are but also how precarious their livelihood is.”Footnote ²⁵ Across Asia, to be sure, precarity is not a novel phenomenon; as Scott demonstrated, moral economies have long worked to buffer against, resist, or subvert it.

With a few exceptions, little work has been done within Asian studies that examines directly the contemporary relation of precarious livelihoods and moral economy, though the former is a condition of life across many parts of the world.Footnote ²⁶ One does need to look far to find those for whom such livelihoods condition the possibilities of life itself—migrant workers, laborers in manufacturing plants and factories within and outside of special economic zones, smallholders dispossessed by large-scale land acquisitions, and many more across Asia. In a recent special issue dedicated to precarity, Teresita Cruz-Del Rosario and Jonathan Rigg posit, as many others do, that conditions of precarity undermine and erode moral economy: “at the extreme, these networks of affect reflected, for example, in Scott's moral economy, have been replaced by atomised individuals with little or no social attachments, such that social inequalities have been replaced by asocial inequalities.”Footnote ²⁷

Given the transformations that have occurred in many parts of Asia in recent decades, there are, indeed, good reasons for prophesying the obsolescence of moral economy. But to see moral economy simply as the flip side of precarity is to miss the ways in which they are interrelated; to neglect what is an equally enduring insight in Scott's landmark work—the way in which “stubborn moral dissent” is a response to precarious livelihoods.Footnote ²⁸ Moral economy was the ground from which resistance and rebellion sprouted, though it was rarely readily visible or discernable. Following this thread from The Moral Economy of the Peasant through Scott's subsequent works, one may ask then whether moral economy may in fact be so readily eclipsed in a neoliberal age. Certainly, the nature of the state and of world markets are remarkably different from what they were in Depression-era Southeast Asia. But, across the region, peasants and growing numbers of people living a precarious existence are up to their necks in water. We would do well to think carefully, as Scott did, about what may buffer them from the ripples and waves yet to come.