Report Of The Land Revenue Settlement Of The Dera Ismail Khan District Of The Punjab 1872 79

Groundbreaking analysis of how colonialism created new conceptual categories and spatial forms that reshaped rural societies. 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. “The Great Agrarian Conquest is a subtle and substantial work of scholarship. If there is one book Indians need to read to understand how colonialism actually worked (or did not work), this is it.” — Ramachandra Guha, in The Wire, in praise of the Indian edition

The Indus basin was once an arid pastoral watershed, but by the second half of the twentieth century, it had become one of the world's most heavily irrigated and populated river basins. Launched under British colonial rule in the nineteenth century, this irrigation project spurred political, social, and environmental transformations that continued after the 1947 creation of the new states of India and Pakistan. In this first large-scale environmental history of the region, David Gilmartin focuses on the changes that occurred in the basin as a result of the implementation of the world's largest modern integrated irrigation system. This masterful work of scholarship explores how environmental transformation is tied to the creation of communities and nations, focusing on the intersection of politics, statecraft, and the environment.