Following the Indian anthropologist Beteille, I define the relationship between landlords, owner-cultivators, tenants, share-croppers and agricultural labourers as constituting the heart of what he has denoted ‘the agrarian hierarchy’. At the same time, I agree with Beteille that these categories derive from a conceptual framework which is no longer well suited to Indian dry grain cultivation, for in the hands of statisticians and development economists they tend to create ‘a strait jacket which grossly distorts the realities of social life in rural India’. Not only is there apt to be much overlap between categories, as with labourers who are also owner-cultivators; but nowadays, with the probable disappearance of renting on any scale, it is common for no more than two distinct categories, cultivators and landless labourers, to be significantly represented in any community, so that hierarchy is inapposite.

However, prior to recent Indian Land Reform legislation which prohibits renting, and to the slightly earlier dissolution of the large hereditary estates, the concept of Indian ‘landlordism’ certainly had much validity in some localities, so that the notion of the agrarian hierarchy, especially in districts where irrigated paddy was the main crop, was a useful differentiating mechanism. But this was not so in Anglophone West Africa in, say, 1900 where landlordism, renting, and daily-paid farm labouring were unknown. This grand inter-continental contrast means that a discussion of the appropriateness, if any, of Western notions of rural class stratification has different historical bases in the two regions.