Books by Ronald E. Seavoy

An analysis of African subsistence culture, which investigates the failures of national agricultural policies and suggests strategies for inducing subsistence farmers to shift to commercial production.

In this controversial study, Seavoy offers a new approach to the problem of periodic peacetime famine based on the actual behavior of peasants.

A sweeping overview of the American peasantry: the largely sharecrop cultivators who, in Seavoy's analysis, rejected the labor norms of commercial agriculture. The study begins with pre-Civil War slave plantations and the landless white peasants who migrated to North America to escape full-time paid labor in Britain.

Seavoy demonstrates that commercial labor norms are essential for producing assured food surpluses in all crop years and an assured food surplus is essential for sustaining the development process. The commercialization of food production is a political process, as in the term political economy.