| Abstract: |
Katherine Bowie uses evidence about textile production in northern Thailand to explore the economic and social history of the Thai peasantry in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In contrast to the prevailing characterization of Thailand of that period as a happy, egalitarian peasant subsistence economy whose existence was insured by the royal Thai family-where "fish abound in the streams and canals and many fruits and vegetables grow without care"-she portrays a struggle for subsistence among the highly stratified rural populace through hard work and complex patterns of exchange. Bowie employs both historical records and field interviews with aged rural inhabitants in building her case.
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