This book analyzes the changing context and conditions of peasant production and livelihood in Southeast Asia since the beginning of the nineteenth century. It argues that, with demographic growth and the nineteenth-century development of great global markets, the size and economic significance of peasantries throughout the region was magnified. The later nineteenth century, indeed, can be described as an 'age of peasantry' in Southeast Asia.

However, such changes gave rise to new forces - stronger states, more regular legal systems, a revolution in communications, intensive commercialization - which themselves worked to undermine the foundations of peasant society as it had existed during this period, and to set peasants upon a trajectory of change which has already effectively consigned the peasantry as a social category, to the past.

Peasants, whose existence had long been defined by subsistence production and local identity, have now become farmers, workers and citizens.