„Der Anbau von Schlafmohn bringt mir Verluste ein“: Warum indische Bauern trotzdem Opium produzierten.

Opium was a major cash-crop in nineteenth-century India. Over a million peasants cultivated poppy for the British-Indian government, which held a monopoly over the production of the drug and could thus keep the prices paid to the cultivators at an extremely low level. The major question this paper seeks to answer is why so many peasants cultivated this laborious crop despite a clear lack of financial incentives. This problem is tackled by applying two approaches from development economics, i. e. interlinked transactions and Kaushi Basu’s triadic relations model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]