The Dispossession of the Peasantry (ص 293)

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The Dispossession of the Peasantry (ص 293)

المحتوى

277
implicit dualist approach of the worst kind. It is the inverse of that form of dualism
that dealt with the European “economy” while ignoring the Palestinian Arabs as
discussed in Chapter 1.
A specific example that directly weakens their argument concerning the
impact of population growth on the size of the holding was their omission of the
role of European settlers in worsening the land/man ratio by their appropriation of
some of the most fertile land and holding it for their exclusive use. This was
certainly a peculiar omission given the importance of population growth in their
argument. Nonetheless, although undoubtedly population growth and partible
inheritance, under certain conditions, may play a role in reducing the average size
of a holding and perhaps in causing landlessness or near landlessness, in itself is an
insufficient explanation, and it does not necessarily have to lead to that. Although
we have no data on Palestine to illustrate this, studies on other parts of the world
have bore this out. For example, a study on Japanese villages “found that the
proportion of landless households was highest in the villages with the best overall
land/man ratios. Thus, . . . it is important to distinguish the effects of absolute
resource scarcity (‘pressure of people on resources’) from the effects of differential
access to those resources (‘pressure of people on people’).”**
As Kay, writing in 1975, and paraphrasing Marx, put it:
It is the social composition of a population rather than its size which
is important. . . . Thus China with the largest population in the
Benjamin White, “Population, Involution and Employment in Rural Java,”
ed. Harriss, 303.
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The Dispossession of the Peasantry

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المنشئ

Riyad Mousa

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