a register of constructs

We are beginning to know something of the political structure of what have been called the new states, many of them post-colonial ones. It is of major importance to understanding the great majority of them to draw a distinction from other, principally western states, whose populations are overwhelmingly urban. In new post-colonial states the population is principally, sometimes overwhelmingly, rural. That has major implications for their polities, since it is a characteristic of rural societies, not just that they are quintessentially committed to agriculture, but that their human settlements are dispersed and not congregated – and therein are often nucleated. As a consequence they have community lives of their own that are ordinarily clearly demarcated from those of surrounding and otherwise like communities; and despite the fact that the political structure superimposed on them may appear, and seek to play, a pervasive role, there are many respects in which so much of rural existence continues entirely, or almost entirely, without any reference to it. That means that at most the political superstructure can only partially, and sometimes no more than marginally, determine the manner in which rural entities actually operate.

It is of some importance that, as in the western world, large landlordism-say of the Egyptian pasha type – has for the most part gone from the new states (it remains more especially in those areas where the Spanish hacienda model held sway, very strikingly, for example, in the Philippines).