Since its publication in 1976 The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in South-east Asia' by James C. Scott has been a benchmark for later discussions on both the nature of peasant societies and the causes of peasant rebellions in the region. Scott rode a wave of academic interest in peasant societies, rebellions and revolutions, begun in I966 with the publication of Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, sustained by Eric Wolf's Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century in x969, and the launching of specialist publications like theJournal of Peasant Studies in 1974, among others. The global backdrop had been three decades of anticolonial rebellion and the emergence of radical Third World states. The previous year, 1975, witnessed the dramatic end of the Vietnam war, a conflict which more than any other had shaped the thinking and expectations of radical scholars in the west about the possibilities of peasant political action. Conference papers and journals attempted to divine the revolutionary potential of the peasantry in various Third World countries. Thailand, for example, was soon expected to go the same way as neighbouring Laos and Kampuchea, overwhelmed by peasant-backed revolutionary forces. Little emphasis at the time was placed on the organizational prerequisites of revolution party organization, and so on as studies tended to assume the spontaneous rebelliousness of peasants in the face of oppression and immiseration. They were heady days and many radicals were infected by a romanticism about peasant movements and peasant societies. The debacle of Pol Pot's Kampuchea was still to come, along with renewed conflict throughout Indochina. Scott's book was a product of this mid-I970s milieu, though it was not unrealistically romantic about the prospects for peasant political action. His attempt to provide a coherent theory of why peasants rebel immediately prompted a wide-ranging and exciting discussion of both peasant societies and the nature of peasant rebellions in South-east Asia. Many authors tried to emulate his book. On the other hand, Scott's work also provoked considerable critical commentary, including a whole book in 1979 by Samuel Popkin, The Rational Peasant, which contained an idiosyncratic critique of moral economy arguments. Unfortunately, since then, arguments about peasant societies and rebellions have