It has often been claimed that money was to be found in much of the African continent before the impact of the European world and the extension of trade made coinage general. When we examine these claims, however, they tend to evaporate or to emerge as tricks of definition. It is an astounding fact that economists have, for decades, been assigning three or four qualities to money when they discuss it with reference to our own society or to those of the medieval and modern world, yet the moment they have gone to ancient history or to the societies and economies studied by anthropologists they have sought the “real” nature of money by allowing only one of these defining characteristics to dominate their definitions.

The district of Malabar on the Southwest coast of India has been a major exporter of a wide variety of agricultural products to Europe for more than two thousand years. Despite the two millenia of sustained contact between agricultural producers and merchants, however, social relationships in land are, even today, of a predominantly feudal character; cultivation techniques are generally primitive, and the rural portion of the district, notwithstanding the great commercial importance of its produce, appears to be surprisingly impoverished. How could the social and economic organization of a people so long exposed to the influence of world market activity remain so little affected by the currents of economic change and development in the outside world? The purpose of this article is to explore, by the study of this extreme example, the reasons for the apparent failure of a pattern of sustained economic growth to become established in a rural area exposed to continuing commercial influences.

The economic differences between the Europeans on the eve of industrialization and the currently less developed peoples has assumed a certain degree of importance in the recent literature. It has been argued that West Europeans had significantly higher per capita incomes than do most of the peoples of the world today and that the levels of living of many people fell off during the process of early industrialization. Obviously, the argument is important in that the levels of living found in most of today's less developed peoples could not decline significantly widiout the risk of disaster.

The gradual yet cumulative advance of West European capitalism was in large part epitomized by the developments of its textile trades. They were the first to carry the seeds of economic change into the stagnant preserves of guild conservatism, and subsequently they again proved to be the pioneers of the new factory system. In Germany the sequence of economic change was not quite as uniform. Each German textile district emerged as a specific case of economic growth with contours of industrial evolution that manifested unique deviations from the broad pattern of development. The heterogeneity of the German lands, particularly marked before the advent of the railways, was both cause and effect of this diversity.

The laissez-faire theory in its various European forms is not as simple or clearcut as it is sometimes presented. Nor is it merely the converse of another theory equally complex but which is often taken simply as one of organization and complete state intervention. From the Physiocrats on, the exponents of the theory of laissez-faire, or freedom of industry, set themselves the task not only of freeing the economy and the individual, but also of directing and nurturing activity designed to improve the economy. This aim took the form of the advocacy of a wide variety of social and state actions; for example, the promotion of a stable currency, science and invention, education of the labor force, humanitarian reforms, especially in penology, and cultural, ideological, and even aesthetic advances. In short, the issue of individualism often became the broader issue of civilization.

Industrial growth and chronic, in many cases severe, inflation are two salient features of the past-war economic history of the larger Latin American countries. There is general recognition that the two phenomena are related, at least in the sense that industry has been one of the major recipients of state subsidies and inflationary credit. But beyond this, analysis divides into the usual demand inflation and cost-push categories.

In historical studies of industrialization prominent attention is usually given to the development of large-scale industry and whenever small industry is considered at all, it is usually introduced only as the starting point of, or a contrast to, large industrial enterprises. This concern with large industry also predominated in the earliest post-war discussions on the economic development of underdeveloped countries and from this period stem the famous and often ridiculed schemes of giant steel plants and other large industrial establishments in littleadvanced countries. During the last few years, however, the general climate of opinion has changed and increasing attention has been paid to small scale and even cottage industries. This has been especially pronounced in the countries of southern and southeastern Asia and is strongly supported by various studies and conferences of the Economic Commission on Asia and the Far East and other organizations associated with the United Nations operating in this part of the world.