This research report argues that during the colonial period the socially acceptable standard living of the smallholder was fundamentally altered. The operation of the smallhold farm unit changed primarily in six areas. These are: 1) food security and consumer goods; 2) changed relations of production on the smallholder plot; 3) customary law and land tenure; 4) wage labour; 5) social differentiation; 6) the long term price elasticity of coffee production.

Smallholders were not completely "captured" and proletarianized but neither did they correspond to Hyden's version of an "uncaptured peasantry". This is primarily because they now required certain goods and services from outside the peasant mode of production as a necessary link in their social reproduction.