Introduction / Barbara Harriss-White and Judith Heyer -- The political economy of agrarian change: dinosaur or phoenix? / Lucia Da Corta -- Strategic dimensions of rural poverty reduction in sub-Saharan Africa / Frank Ellis -- From 'rural labour' to 'classes of labour': class fragmentation, caste and class struggle at the bottom of the Indian labour hierarchy / Jens Lerche -- Poverty: causes, responses and consequences in rural South Africa / Elizabeth Francis -- Seasonal food crises and social protection in Africa / Stephen Devereux -- The political economy of contract farming in tea in Kenya: the Kenya Tea Development Agency (KTDA), 1964-2001 / Cosmas Milton Obote Ochieng -- Networking for success: informal enterprise and popular associations in Nigeria / Kate Meagher -- Free and unfree labour in the Cape wine industry, 1838-1988 / Gavin Williams -- The opium 'revolution': continuity or change in rural Afghanistan? / Adam Pain -- The marginalisation of Dalits in a modernising economy / Judith Heyer -- Shifting the 'grindstone of caste'? Decreasing dependency among Dalit labourers in Tamil Nadu / Hugo Gorringe -- Liberalisation and transformations in India's informal economy: female breadwinners in working-class households in Chennai / Karin Kapadia -- Dalit entrepreneurs in middle India / Aseem Prakash -- Stigma and regions of accumulation: mapping Dalit and Adivasi capital in the 1990s / Barbara Harriss-White and Kaushal Vidyarthee.