State And Agriculture In Iraq

Prior to the oil booms of the 1950s and the 1970s, Iraqs agriculture experienced many decades of growth, thereby underpinning the development of the modern state and the class structure of the pre-1958 period. This book argues that, by the 1950s, the agricultural sector that had earlier been dynamic and export-oriented was already tending to stagnation before both the early oil boom and the radical land reform of 1958. The sector that had largely relied on renewable natural resources, indigenous technology and customary social organisation had given rise to highly iniquitous income and wealth distribution, and it became associated with an entrenched socio-political structure that resisted reform and failed to raise productivity. Mahdis analysis of Iraqs pre-oil agriculture forms the background to the main part of this book that deals with the impact on agriculture and the countrys economy of the large increases in oil revenues from the early 1950s until the eve of the IranIraq wa