In many peasant populations, dealers and money-lenders are said to dominate the village economy. Constant relationships to their clients enable them to exercise political as well as economic influence. In the Turkish villages, since government agencies buy the grain and provide credit, there is no class of merchants or money-lenders who have permanent relations of this kind with particular villagers. Possibly such a system existed in the past. The tax farmers may well have exercised some such hold over some villagers. But most large private debts of which I knew were borrowed from men in other villages, and it may well be that for villages as remote and independent as Sakaltutan, the risks were, for political reasons, too high to tempt urban money-lenders into becoming their patrons.
Except when they become involved in illegal and usurious loans from professional money-lenders - and these cases now seem to be rare and becoming rarer, owing to government credit - the chronic indebtedness of the villager is not a social evil. Generally, those who are heavily in debt are those whose assets in land and animals give them both an overall solvent position, and great hope that they will be able to recover. Most villagers accept a certain degree of indebtedness, to neighbours and to the Agricultural Bank, as an ordinary and permanent part of their lives.
The household is practically the only organised economic unit in rural society. Each household is in fact a firm engaged in agricultural production, and, excluding one or two newfangled enterprises, such as diesel mills, no other comparable economic