Three Deltas: Accumulation and Poverty in Rural Burma, Bengal and South India

World poverty poses urgent practical and theoretical problems. In Three Deltas, poverty is seen not as a natural problem of scarcity or as the result of economic backwardness or overpopulation, but emphatically as the outcome of the unequal relationships between groups of people. This comparative study makes a detailed analysis of the historical development of relations of `primary′ accumulation - relations through which surplus is extracted from primary producers - in Lower Burma, Bengal and the Kaveri delta in South India between the 1750s and the 1980s.