Agrarian and Political Transformation in the Developing World

Between the 1960s and 1990s, developing countries experienced a technological revolution in agriculture owing to the spread of high-yielding variety (HYV) crops  known as the "green revolution". Focusing on the case of India, in this book I argue that that the green revolution also had far-reaching political consequences -- putting farmers into growing contact with markets and government and mobilizing agricultural producers as an interest group in national politics, with important consequences for democracy, public policy, and development. 

The book focuses on India. I document how the spread of HYV crops across Indian districts contributed to the breakdown of traditional landlord-peasant relationships associated with subsistence agriculture, and also weakened India's dominant Congress party which had traditionally relied upon these patron-client networks for vote mobilization. I also document how HYV crops gave rise to a new class of commercial farmers increasingly dependent upon state-controlled policies governing subsidies and prices, contributing to a wave of rural collective action and, eventually, the rise of agrarian political parties which democratized the Indian political system.

Leveraging natural experiments, historical datasets linking election outcomes to measures of local agricultural technology adoption, a new database of rural collective action events extracted from thousands of newspaper articles (see collective action events database in top right panel), and comparative historical case studies based on original archival research, the book demonstrates how the spread of high-yielding variety (HYV) crops across Indian districts between the 1960s and 1980s played a key role in the transformation and democratization of modern Indian politics. 

The book concludes with comparative case studies and a cross-national analysis of the political effects of the green revolution, in countries ranging from Mexico to Thailand. Overall, it aims to highlight not just industrialization but also agricultural revolutions -- the "commercialization of agriculture" famously highlighted by Barrington Moore -- as a pivotal step in the economic and political evolution of developing societies and the role of technological change as a form of political 'creative destruction'. To learn more, please check out an article published in the APSR here and a brief summary at Ideas for India here as well as a talk here on part of the book project at the Center for the Advanced Study of India.