Subsistence, not profit, is the axis on which Scott builds his account of peasant politics in colonial Southeast Asia. A cultivating household is a unit of consumption before it is one of production, and the fear of falling below a survival threshold explains choices that look irrational by ordinary accounting: scattered strips, several seed varieties, punishing labour for tiny gains.

Village institutions extended the same logic outward. Redistributed common land, obligations laid on the well-off, patron-client ties and reciprocity all worked as rough insurance, and because they were experienced as rights, their breach produced a sense of injustice rather than mere hardship.

Commercialised agriculture and the fiscal demands of the colonial state stripped that insurance away in Burma and Vietnam, while fixed rents and head taxes shifted risk onto those least able to carry it. The revolts Scott examines he reads as the protests of consumers, backward-looking demands that an older bargain be honoured.