Living permanently close to the margin, Scott argues, gives peasant households a particular logic. Seed choices, planting practices, patronage, communal land and work sharing are arranged to lower the odds of falling below subsistence rather than to raise average income, and that safety-first principle yields a standard for judging landlords and states. What matters to a cultivator is less the average share taken than whose income is stabilised at whose expense, so a fixed rent or a flat head tax can bite harder than a larger but elastic claim on the crop. Commercialised agriculture and expanding colonial bureaucracies in Lower Burma and Vietnam replaced flexible obligations with rigid ones and stripped away older cushions, as tenancy spread and absentee owners took over land. The Depression risings, Saya San in Burma and the Nghe-Tinh soviets in Vietnam, are read through the indignation that produced them, as claims about justice rather than reflexes of poverty.