ABSTRACT
The existence of livelihoods analysis is testimony to the now general acknowledgement that rural areas are: changing very rapidly; no longer necessarily agrarian; no longer bounded by the village and that there are many categories of economic actors in rural areas. Livelihoods analysis focuses on the context of people’s livelihood decisionmaking, but not the causes of the changed context. There is a need for historical study to establish chains of causation revealing not just immediate proximate causes, but also ultimate causations.
