The Making of an Indian Ocean World-economy 1250-1650 ― Princes, Paddy Fields, and Bazaars

Locating historical evidence from south India within patterns of long-term, large-scale historical change in societies based on wet-rice cultivation and on the interaction between nomads and sedentary peoples in Asia, this book charts a distinct pattern of socio-historical change to challenge Eurocentric notions of social evolution; argues that production conditions in wet-rice agriculture did not favour large farms and that the absence of a political relationship between capitalists and rulers led to the absence of monopolies which alone generate the volumes of surplus to facilitate the emergence of capitalism; instead it argues that the density of commercial linkages led to commercialism without capitalism; the large densities of population that could be supported by rice cultivation promoted an 'industrious revolution' in which skill and manual dexterity had a decisive advantage over machines; in the absence of capital accumulation, terms such as 'cores' and 'peripheries' are inappropriate to describe conditions of brief situational advantage.

Ravi Palat is the Professor of Sociology at SUNY Binghamton and previously taught Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii and Sociology at the University of Auckland. Palat is the author of Capitalist Restructuring and the Pacific Rim (2004) and the editor of Pacific-Asia and the Future of the World-System (1994).