Abstract
The paper is an attempt on polarized development. over the last millennium, focussing on a small agrarian region in the Tamil country of South India. From the perspective of Friedmann's “General Theory”, the paper traces the development of this region through five successive stages of integration, each of which encompassed the study area into a wider and more complex spatial system. Elementary innovations are identified that, at each of these stages, generated specific types of authority-dependency relationships which, in turn, integrated the respective innovative cores and their dependent peripheries into single spatial systems. The paper shows how the institutional and spatial structures of rural South India have been successively transformed in this process, to serve the needs of the various core regions. It also demonstrates how, since colonial times, new types of authority-dependency relationships have emerged that, by organizing the dependency of the peripheries through systems of market and supply, have resulted in development of the core regions, on the one hand, and underdevelopment of the peripheries, on the other.
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Bohle, HG. From centre to periphery: Changing spatial structures in Rural South India, 985–1985. GeoJournal 10, 5–15 (1985). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00174661
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00174661