At the beginning of the twenty-first century an idealized view of markets informs government policy. Real differences in how markets interact with social change are obscured and public action on poverty is constrained. Markets, Class and Social Change uses a detailed study of the grain trade in Bangladesh to show how socially-constrained patterns of market involvement may systematically benefit the rich while disadvantaging the poor. More generally, the book suggests that markets are implicated in the making of society, its divisions, identities and directions.

BEN CROW is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has written or co-authored several books including Sharing the Ganges, Third World Atlas, Survival and Change in the Third World and The Food Question.