Algeria has endured the classic problems of exaggerated industrialisation, ill-managed farm collectivisation, and rural depopulation.

ECONOMIST: Algeria

Under collectivisation, with fewer beasts, greater mobility and the state delivery of supplementary feed, such a disaster would not have happened.

ECONOMIST: Nomadism in Mongolia

It concentrates on the Golovin family from Obukhovo, a village renamed when the new serfdom of collectivisation arrived, the church bells taken away to be melted down as peasants ululate.

ECONOMIST: The Soviet Union

Mr Metcalfe is a modest writer who pays due homage to long-forgotten predecessors such as Ella Maillart, a free-spirited Swiss sportswoman who chronicled the savage collectivisation of Karakalpak agriculture in the early 1930s.

ECONOMIST: The lost people of Central Asia

The shift from collectivisation to a market economy, Mr Sneath argues, was in many ways a far more wrenching change, one that undermined or destroyed institutions that had long sustained nomadic pastoralism, particularly ones that spread risk and reaped economies of scale.

ECONOMIST: Nomadism in Mongolia