This preface explains why this project has been addictive—question 1—and will attempt to answer the common man’s reasonable question about its purposes, after which we will attempt to respond to question 2 about its practical relevance. On question 1, ever since 1973 the economic and social dynamics of urban growth and urban–rural relations have been being tracked every ten years or so in a long-term research project involving business histories in a South Indian market town, Arni. While towns have been the object of study in sociology, geography, politics and urban planning,1 we have been told by urban studies experts that this project on a small-town economy is now uniquely long-lasting. It has been closely associated with the long-term village studies of agrarian change in northern Tamil Nadu (Maps 1, 2 and 3). These randomly selected villages were part of Tamil Nadu’s rice bowl in the 1970s. Several of these villages were in the hinterland of the market town—off the beaten track of the Madras-Bangalore highway (now a globalized industrial corridor) but at the dynamic centre of the Green Revolution on Tamil Nadu’s Coromandel plain. Over four decades, this research has explored a rolling agenda of questions about ‘Middle India’, non-metropolitan India’s economic and social development, which cannot be answered in any other way than through sustained or long-term rural and urban field research. In so doing, it has been compelled to engage with a great range of theoretical ideas from social science disciplines.