Robert Tawney famously described the vulnerable state of the Chinese peasantry in the early twentieth century as follows: ‘There are districts in which the position of the rural population is that of a man standing permanently up to the neck in water, so that even a ripple is sufficient to drown him.’ James Scott later used this description to draw an evocative account of peasant rebellion in Southeast Asia in his seminal The Moral Economy of the Peasant. Scott discussed the destruction of what he termed as the ‘moral economy’, the worldview and practices of the peasants premised on the subsistence ethic, due to colonialism. Scott's description of the Vietnamese peasantry was in contrast to Samuel Popkin's account of the Southeast Asian peasant in The Rational Peasant. Popkin stressed that peasants behaved rationally and benefited from market practices that were ushered in with colonialism. The test of time has seen Scott's scholarship remain a more convincing account of how peasant societies experience colonialism with Popkin's explanation marginalized. This may well hold for Vietnam where the pernicious effects of colonialism were more pronounced, leading to numerous peasant rebellions and famine, but for the Punjab the academic discourse remains deeply divided.