ABSTRACT
To be sure, different social class fractions in Laos were affected to different degrees by the global economic depression. There was, however, no direct analogue in Laos to what Scott calls the "depression rebellions" in Nhge Tilth (Central Annam) or Lower Burma where "depression delivered the coup de grace to an agrarian order already weakened by structural changes well before 1930". Neither do we find in Laos a chronological link between a drop in the price of rice and expressions of peasant resistance (Scott 1976:144-120). Onerous the tax-corvee burden may have been upon the polyethnic peasantry of Laos, but it was not "murderous", with respect to the majority Lao peasantry at least, as was definitely the case in famine and dearth-ridden Annam.
