ABSTRACT
Our thesis, then, has been to stress the radical historical disjunction opened up by the Lao and minority peasants' experience with colonialism. This we affirmed in our scrutiny of the role of capital in the pre-monopoly and monopoly stage, the State-sponsored development project, the State-initiated process of primitive capital accumulation and colonial control over the head-tax and labor process. To return to the theoretical underpinning of this study, it could be said that any description of the colonial process in the periphery which ignores identification of the prevailing configuration and articulation of modes of production within an historical world framework as well as the central question of the extraction and distribution of surplus, exploitation and class struggle and also hegemonic systems of ideological domination which permeate village, community and peasant procedure is simply to miss the richness, complexity and diversity of peasant and proto-nationalist responses to the colonial experience.
