Paper, Pottery and Prosperity

Paper, Pottery and Prosperity focuses on the role of handicraft production in rural development in Northern Thailand, exploring how handicrafts evolve over time in the context of a modernising economy. This links with on-going debates on community-based development theory, including those related to rural industrialisation, rural-urban relations and biases, indigenous knowledge, rural poverty and livelihoods. The research seeks to return to an issue which was a popular area of investigation in the 1970s, namely the role of small-scale industries in rural development. Rural spaces have always contained an element of non-farm activities, often classified as ‘handicraft production’. To date, there is no book which takes such an approach to building an understanding of Thai handicrafts and rural development. The book provides an alternative and different insight into a range of rural development debates in Thailand