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Linguistic evidence strongly suggests that maize penetrated the interior of tropical Africa from the coastal regions, but the timing and mode of its introduction cannot be established. The commonly repeated assertion that the Portuguese brought maize to tropical Africa from the New World cannot be documented at this juncture, although they seem certainly to have had economic motives for doing so.Maize was probably introduced to tropical Africa at more than one point and at different times. Maize was widely grown along the coast from the River Gambia to Sâo Tomé, around the mouth of the River Congo, and possibly in Ethiopia, in the sixteenth century. There is reference to it in all these places, in Zanzibar, and around the mouth of the River Ruvuma in the seventeenth century; and it was not only mentioned but described as an important foodstuff and a major provision for slave ships between Liberia and the Niger Delta during the same century.Much less information is available for the interior, but it clearly seems to have been unknown in Uganda as late as 1861. Until well within the present century, it was neither a major export nor a mainstay of the diet in most of eastern and central tropical Africa, the bulk of the areas where it is now of major importance.

This article argues that the concept of “subsistence agriculture”—widely encountered and long used in the literature—is not meaningful enough to be analytically useful as usually employed and should be abandoned. Particularly important for policy is the fact that use of the term “subsistence agriculture” leads to implicitly treating all small‐scale agriculture as a homogeneous residual made up of producers who vary little in their potential contribution to economic development. Data are presented which strongly suggest that small‐scale agriculture in less‐developed countries is not homogeneous so far as decision‐making situations are concerned. The second half of the article considers development of an alternative set of criteria for classifying small‐scale farmers that would reflect meaningful differences in decision‐making experience and decision‐making situations. A tentative set of such criteria for which data are now available, or could be developed with relative ease, are presented to illustrate the relevance of such a classification for development planning and policy.

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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Geographical Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Geographical Review. GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEWS GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEWSHowever, I am compelled to take exception to some of McNee's emphases. Only one short chapter is devoted to developing countries. He justifies this on the basis of editorial policy, but he also stresses that "most of the world's production is concentrated in the areas affected strongly by the Second Agglomerative Revolution." Two things are implicit in this explanation. First, it implies that all good and progress are equated with production as it is understood in materialistically oriented market and nonmarket economies. Second, McNee evidently believes in the inevitability of the worldwide metropolitanization process. The appearance of new innovative ideas, of a new type of occupance (not another "revolution"), he regards as remote and improbable.In the future, he concludes, "the economic geography of the whole earth will be organized on the basis of broadly similar locational ideas," presumably those of metropolitanization. The fact that the growth of metropolitanization in quest of illusory higher standards of living has created havoc in our environment, both physical and social, almost escapes his attention; only the apparent success of the process, supposedly the sign of the "distinct advantages in the new patterns" is strongly emphasized. This apparent success, however, may be more than anything else the outcome of the lack of innovation in the field, permitting the existing metropolitan forms and the locational patterns associated with them to linger. Although McNee remotely acknowledges such a conjecture, he does not discuss the human aspects of the evolving or already evolved locational patterns. Preoccupied with economies only, he overlooks the fact that the elaborated rationale for the emerged or emerging economic organization of geographical space, teeming with hundreds of millions of people, tends to shed a kind of splendor on the concurrent processes of denaturalization and dehumanization of space that is so organized. But my remarks, which may also reflect a biased attitude, are marginal to the content and scope of the book. They certainly do not diminish its exceptional values.-ABRAHAM MELEZIN FROM PEASANT TO FARMER: A Revolutionary Strategy for Development.

One of the more striking recent trends in the study of African history has been the mushrooming of studies focusing on the “underdevelopment” of Africa (or some part of it) following the publication of Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa in 1972. Part of the appeal of the “underdevelopment” literature is that it stands the apologists for colonialism on their heads. Barely more than a decade earlier, as the 1950s were coming to a close, one could readily find settlers, shopkeepers, colonial bureaucrats, and others arguing that the mounting pressure for independence in sub-Saharan Africa should be resisted because European rule had brought “development” to the continent. It is not surprising, therefore, that after a decade of independence there should be a ready audience for the argument that colonial rule did not “develop” African economies but, to the contrary, actually “underdeveloped” them—and perhaps we should also not be surprised that “underdevelopment” is often not defined oris defined inconsistently.The central focus of this essay will be the main difficulties of studying either “development” or “underdevelopment” and, in particular, the problems of determining the causes of either of these states at any given period in Africa's history. All the examples from the “underdevelopment” literature will be drawn from Rodney's book, primarily because the work seems representative of the growing body of literature on this subject and because it has been by far the most influential of the studies dealing with the topic in Africa. I would like to emphasize that in the following discussion my approach is more that of the economist than of the historian, a point which will be clearly reflected in the few points I have chosen for illustration.