An Agrarian History Of South Asia

Originally published in 1999, this book offers a comprehensive historical framework for understanding the regional diversity of agrarian South Asia.

In this volume leading historians and economists from India and the West consider some persistent features and variable forces which explain changes through their impact on different levels of decision-making in agriculture. New light is cast on both the pre-colonial periods, and on currentdevelopment policies and problems.

Economic policy analysis of the relationship between the political power of local government and productivity in the agricultural sector in South Asia - analyses the impact of social change on sugar cane agricultural production, as well as historical aspects of power structures in India; examines economic implications of local level power configurations, esp. As regards farm-level decision making; discusses determinants and varieties of rural mobilization. References, statistical tables.

Questions of who can access land and who is excluded from it underlie many recent social and political conflicts in Southeast Asia. Powers of Exclusion examines the key processes through which shifts in land relations are taking place, notably state land allocation and provision of property rights, the dramatic expansion of areas zoned for conservation, booms in the production of export-oriented crops, the conversion of farmland to post-agrarian uses, “intimate” exclusions involving kin and co-villagers, and mobilizations around land framed in terms of identity and belonging. In case studies drawn from seven countries, the authors find that four “powers of exclusion”—regulation, the market, force and legitimation—have combined to shape land relations in new and often surprising ways. Land debates are often presented as a conflict between market-oriented land use with full private property rights on the one side, and equitable access, production for subsistence, and respect for custom on the other. The authors step back from these debates to point out that any productive use of land requires the exclusion of some potential users, and that most projects for transforming land relations are thus accompanied by painful dilemmas. Rather than counterposing “exclusion” to “inclusion,” the book argues that attention must be paid to who is excluded, how, why, and with what consequences. Powers of Exclusion is a path-breaking book that draws on insights from multiple disciplines to map out the new contours of struggles for land in Southeast Asia. The volume provides a framework for analyzing the dilemmas of land relations across the Global South and beyond.

This book examines how, over colonial times, the diverse practices and customs of an existing rural universe—with its many forms of livelihood—were reshaped to create a new agrarian world of settled farming. While focusing on Punjab, India, this pathbreaking analysis offers a broad argument about the workings of colonial power: the fantasy of imperialism, it says, is to make the universe afresh. Such radical change, Neeladri Bhattacharya shows, is as much conceptual as material. Agrarian colonization was a process of creating spaces that conformed to the demands of colonial rule. It entailed establishing a regime of categories—tenancies, tenures, properties, habitations—and a framework of laws that made the change possible. Agrarian colonization was in this sense a deep conquest. Colonialism, the book suggests, has the power to revisualize and reorder social relations and bonds of community. It alters the world radically, even when it seeks to preserve elements of the old. The changes it brings about are simultaneously cultural, discursive, legal, linguistic, spatial, social, and economic. Moving from intent to action, concepts to practices, legal enactments to court battles, official discourses to folklore, this book explores the conflicted and dialogic nature of a transformative process. By analyzing this great conquest, and the often silent ways in which it unfolds, the book asks every historian to rethink the practice of writing agrarian history and reflect on the larger issues of doing history.

This collection of fourteen essays presents a unique comparative analysis of agrarian change in the main rice-growing regions of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand. Its central theme is the interplay between agrarian relations and wider political-economic systems. By drawing on historical materials as well as intensive field research, the contributors show how local-level mechanisms of labor control and accumulation both reflect and alter larger political and economic forces. The key to understanding these connections lies in the structure and exercise of power at different levels of society. The approach developed in this volume grows out of a set of detailed local-level studies in regions that have experienced rapid technological change and commercialization. This comparative focus calls into question widely held views of technology and the growth of markets as the chief sources of agrarian change. By relating local-level processes to variations in the structure of state power, the history of agrarian resistance, and the particular forms of capitalist development, the authors suggest an alternative approach to the analysis of agrarian change. This collection of fourteen essays presents a unique comparative analysis of agrarian change in the main rice-growing regions of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand. Its central theme is the interplay between agrarian relations and wider political-economic systems. By drawing on historical materials as well as intensive field research, the contributors show how local-level mechanisms of labor control and accumulation both reflect and alter larger political and economic forces. The key to understanding these connections lies in the structure and exercise of power at different levels of society. The approach developed in this volume grows out of a set of detailed local-level studies in regions that have experienced rapid technological change and commercialization. This comparative focus calls into question widely held views of technology and the growth of markets as the chief sources of agrarian change. By relating local-level processes to variations in the structure of state power, the history of agrarian resistance, and the particular forms of capitalist development, the authors suggest an alternative approach to the analysis of agrarian change.

This volume explores the process of social changes which unfolded in rural society of early medieval Bengal, especially the formation of stratified land relations and occupational groups which later got systematised as jātis. One of the first books to systematically reconstruct the early history of the region, this book presents a history of the economy, polity, law, and social order of early medieval Bengal through a comprehensive study of land and society. It traces the changing power relations among constituents of rural society and political institutions, and unravels the contradictions growing among them. The author describes the changing forms of agrarian development which were deeply associated with these overarching structures and offers an in-depth analysis of a wide range of textual sources in Sanskrit and other languages, especially contemporary inscriptions pertaining to Bengal. The volume will be an essential resource for researchers and academics interested in the history of Bengal, and the social and economic history of early South Asia.