An intimate account of the emergence of capitalist relations among indigenous highlanders in Indonesia who privatized their common land to plant a boom crop, cacao. Spurred by the hope of ending their poverty and isolation, some prospered, while others lost their land and struggled to sustain their families. Tania Murray Li's richly peopled ethnography takes the reader into the highlanders' world, exploring the dilemmas they faced as sharp inequalities emerged among them.

Tania Murray Li is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, where she holds the Canada Research Chair in the Political-Economy and Culture of Asia. She is the author of The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics, also published by Duke University Press; coauthor of Powers of Exclusion: Land Dilemmas in Southeast Asia; and editor of Transforming the Indonesian Uplands: Marginality, Power and Production.