66 SOCIAL SCIENTIST texts, published in English over the last thirty years, which must now run to well over fifty, only three might be described as Marxist development texts. These are Paul Baran, Political Economy of Growth (1957); Maurice Dobb, Economic Growth and Underdeveloped Countries (1963); and Geoffrey Kay, Development and Under development—A Marxist Analysis (1975). Baran's book has been immensely influential among Marxists, and is still used. It is now significantly dated, however, and several of its formulations have been questioned. The Dobb text is good as far as it goes, but it was conceived and written as a pamphlet, rather than a book, and must be read as such. It is, indeed, a great pity that Maurice Dobb never wrote a full-scale, general text on development. His writing in this field and his strangely neglected Delhi lectures of 19514 suggested the possibility of a truly magisterial work. Kay's book is not, really, written as a text-book either. It is extremely useful, and in parts stimulating; but it is rather arid, sets out Marxist concepts and the basic approach in too condensed a fashion, has little to say about concrete situations; and concentrates on one 'explanation' of under development—the role oF merchant capital—to the exclusion of others. There is, one need hardly add, a vast Marxist literature on 'develop-ment' and ^undcr-devclopment5, in both article and book form,and both theoretical and empirical. Yet, there has appeared in recent years no text-book which seeks to present a coherent and full treatment in the Marxist tradition. Araiya Bagchi has written a book which attempts just that. His book, then, is to be greeted with particular interest; and, indeed, with a sense of anticipation if one is familiar with the range and quality of his previous work. If one moves from the global to the more parochial level, one observes that Bagchi pursued his doctoral work at Cambridge, and taught economics there before returning to Calcutta. It might, nevertheless, seem a little surprising that Bagchi's book should appear in the Modern Cambridge Economics series, which, although obviously 'radical' in intent, is hardly a bastion of Marxist economics. There is, however, a kind of dialectic justice in this, when one considers that the equivalent volume in the old Cambridge Economic Handbooks series, the predecessor to the modern series, was P T Baucr and B S Yamey, The Economics of Underdeveloped Countries (first published in 1957), written from an extreme laissez-faire standpoint. Had history repeated itself exactly, I suppose that someone like Dccpak Lal, rather than Amiya Bagchi, would have been asked to write the current volume. There is, also, something of a precedent from the old scries. Kcynes, its first editor (from 1922 to 1936), had written in his Introduction to the series that its authors would be "generally speaking... orthodox members of the Cambridge School of Economics", who would have drawn 'most of their ideas about the subject, and even their predjudices' from Marshall and Pigou (as cited in the Series Preface to Bagchi's book, p vi). The old series did, nontheless, include Maurice Dobb's