From Rice Fields to Killing Fields : Syracuse University Press : 9780815635413 : 0815635419 : 30 Sep 2017 : Between 1975 and 1979, the Communist Party of Kampuchea fundamentally transformed the social, economic, political, and natural landscape of Cambodia. During this time, as many as two million Cambodians died from exposure,disease, and starvation, or were executed at the hands of the party. The dominant interpretation of Cambodian history during this period presents the CPK as a totalitarian, communist, and autarkic regime seeking to reorganize Cambodian society around a primitive, agrarian political economy. From Rice Fields to Killing Fields challenges previous interpretations and provides a documentary-based Marxist interpretation of the political economy of Democratic Kampuchea. Tyner argues that Cambodia's mass violence was the consequence not of the deranged attitudes and paranoia of a few tyrannical leaders but of the structural violence, the direct result of a series of pol