Agricultural Development in the World Periphery: A General Overview

The objective of the Chapter 1 is to present a general overview of the agricultural development in the world periphery to serve as an introduction to this volume, whose aim is to provide a long-term perspective that allows a better understanding of the process of agricultural transformations. This process shows great diversity, especially concerning the drivers of change in regions with low levels of development, institutional restrictions, a variety of distances to the technological frontiers, and different modalities of participation in the international markets. The big trends and stylised facts of the world core and the agriculture of the periphery are described, and the content of each chapter is briefly introduced. Finally, some concluding remarks are proposed to answer the research question: what can we learn from history?