In this unique book, Harriss-White brings together ten essays written by herself and her research team on Arni and its surrounding rural areas. They track the changing nature of local business and the workforce; their urban-rural relations, their regulation through civil society organizations and social practices, their relations to the state and to India’s accelerating and dynamic growth. That most people live outside the metropolises holds for many other developing countries and makes this book, and the ideas and methods that frame it, highly relevant to a global development audience.
Barbara Harriss-White is Emeritus Fellow and Professor of Development Studies at Oxford University, Senior Research Fellow in Area Studies, Oxford University, coordinator of the South Asia Research Cluster at Wolfson College, Oxford and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. Alone or with others she has written and edited 35 books and over 225 book chapters and journal papers, almost all on India. Her research interests span India’s small towns, agriculture and its energetics, the informal capitalist economy and its regulative politics and policy, and many aspects of deprivation.