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This chapter aims to improve our understanding of political modernization and state formation in Porfirian Chiapas ‘from below’, explaining specifically how the regime consolidated power within the Indian communities in order to carry out policies aimed at strengthening the national state and developing the export economy. The first section looks at the role of schoolteachers in secular state-building and the development of commercial agriculture from around 1855 until 1910. The second section examines the relationship between the jefaturas políticas, caciquismo, and forced labour, particularly in the export sector. The final section analyzes the impact of centralization and the role of coercion and consent in political and economic relationships in central and northern Chiapas. It argues that the Porfirian state achieved considerable hegemony by penetrating and manipulating ‘traditional’ structures of power in the countryside in order to consolidate the regime and modernize the economy.

This chapter discusses the plights of a regular Southern farmer and his climb up the “agricultural ladder”. Merchants were of equal importance in the Southern agricultural scene and had even been blamed for the South's debilitating addiction to cotton for they served as links that tie isolated farms to commercial agriculture. This chapter also touches on the problems connected with cotton production such as more tenancy among races, fewer livestock, and less grain. It also looks at social issues like family planning, women's labor, and mobility. Teaching was one of the few professions that women were employed in. This chapter also touches on political battles regarding laws requiring livestock to be fenced leaving landless farmers no way of keeping their animals. Other issues regarding tenantry and landownership are also tackled in this chapter.

This chapter focuses on the driving forces behind land use change in upland areas of the Sing district in Laos and how these changes affect local people's livelihoods and their relationship with land. Changes include expansion of agricultural lands, replacement old swidden and fallow lands, and encroachment of commercial agriculture into forest, as well as complex interaction between local stakeholders and the evolution of policies that influence households’ decisions on land use and their livelihoods. Intensification of land use for commercial agriculture is especially prominent in areas along the road where population are concentrated due to government policies encouraging relocation of upland people. Different factors influence farmers’ decisions to plant commercial crops, including concentration of population and loss of access to extensive agricultural lands, increased need for cash income, and available access to capital and inputs. Villagers are increasingly privatizing areas of communal land by planting rubber, and making claims to land, as there is no formal land title issued for households. Competition for land is also increasing as investors and others make claims to land. Loss of access to land and other basic means of livelihood is creating a new kind of poverty in rural Laos.

This chapter offers an overview of the Muslim notables and the scope and structure of capitalistic commercial agriculture they developed in the Xinjiang oasis. In particular, it argues that the Qing empire played a pivotal role in the expansion of the beg enterprise, which caused social tensions within the oasis society resulting in a series of anti-beg and anti-Qing revolts led by Sufi holy man (khwaja). Their story revises the previous narrative on the Qing empire in Central Asia, which was written from a China-centered perspective, and contributes to the global understanding of capitalism by identifying native capitalist developments in Chinese Central Asia, which has often been considered a backwater of world history.

Chapter 5 draws on a broad range of evidence to develop a view of what the agricultural landscape of the Rio Hondo basin, now on the Belize-Mexican border, must have looked like in the heavily populated Classic era landscape. The authors use Contact period Spanish accounts to describe trade in agricultural products–especially cacao, but also achiote and vanilla–that were particularly prized from this region. Ten years of research on the drained field agricultural systems, such as the Chan Cahal fields near Blue Creek, identified the timespan for commercial level production, and computer assisted analysis of aerial and satellite photographs are beginning to document the massive scale of this enterprise.

This chapter traces the anti-authoritarian traditions of Jones County dissenters to their ancestral roots in Revolutionary Era North Carolina. Describing societal conflicts generated by the emergence of a slave-based commercial economy, it locates ancestors of Jones County Unionists within the religious and political upheavals of the late 18^th century. Emphasizing the effects of the Great Awakening and the Regulator Movement on class-based resistance to conventional authority, the chapter describes a white patriarchy in which race and gender domination played key roles in developing an ethos of male honor dependent on both. The yeomanry, it concludes, fought economic marginalization amid expanding plantation agriculture by moving west in ever-greater numbers.

This chapter traces the westward migration of farmers from North and South Carolina to what eventually became Jones County, Mississippi, in 1826. The divergent lives of migrants seeking escape from the expanding slave-based plantation system are embodied in two Jones County settlers: Norvell Robertson, a prominent minister and slaveholder, and Stacy Collins, a prosperous non-slaveholding farmer/herder of the county. Robertson implemented pro-missionary Baptist reforms in frontier settlements, while Collins joined others in regularly petitioning the federal government to provide cheap land, counties, courthouses, and judges to frontier settlers. These two men, the chapter demonstrates, represented a larger divide within the religious and economic hierarchies of Jones County that would eventually bring conflict to the region.