A clear-eyed, field-driven account of village life in South India that reads as both scholarship and portrait. Village life reveals hidden order. Gilbert Slater's Economic Studies (Volume I) Some South Indian Villages combines meticulous observation with disciplined economic inquiry, offering an uncommon marriage of social description and quantitative attention. Drawing on surveys, household detail and communal practices, Slater reconstructs the everyday economy of agrarian society in India: land use, labour relations, credit and the informal institutions that regulated exchange and belonging. The book is at once a work of south indian village studies and a model of rural economic analysis, valuable to historians tracing british india social history and to researchers conducting historical economic research into early 20th century India. Its restrained prose and empirical richness make it a practical anthropology students resource and a worthwhile addition to any academic reference collection that explores south india local history, Cambridge economic studies and the wider corpus of rural development classics. Republished by Alpha Editions in a careful modern edition, this volume preserves the spirit of the original while making it effortless to enjoy today - a heritage title prepared for readers and collectors alike. As a contemporary witness to colonial period rural life, the work carries enduring literary and historical significance: it is both a documentary record and a text of readable intelligence. Accessible and engaging for casual readers; prized by classic-literature collectors and indispensable for libraries, students and scholars seeking grounded case studies of village economy. Useful in seminars and for independent study, the book functions as an anthropology students resource and a primer in methods for rural economic analysis, showing how careful fieldwork and straightforward statistics can illuminate social processes. Curators and scholars building an academic reference collection value Slater's empirical chapters when tracing the evolution of agrarian society in India. Equally, casual readers intrigued by south india local history or the textures of colonial period rural life find vivid scenes and steady intelligence; classic-literature collectors appreciate the book's restored presentation alongside other Cambridge economic studies and rural development classics.