Chapters in this volume look at issues of land, tenure, and peasant from a variety of different disciplines—history, anthropology, economics, geography, political science, sociology. They furnish fresh insights on discrete localities and problems. Each is by a specialist who deals with intricate ways in which land and lord and labour have been combined and changed. Poverty and scarcity are not the same. Abolishing poverty by economic development alone, without coming to grips with conflicts, can beg the question and end in futility. Contributors emphasize the fallacy of thinking that, with just a little more money, fertilizer or know-how (often coming from an alien environment), problems of land tenure and distribution can be resolved. Socio-economic engineering, however well intentioned, is prone to end in frustration and failure, quite oblivious of how or why.