Download or read book Agrarian Development in Colonial India written by Peter Robb and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2021-07-08 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book looks at agriculture, development, poverty and British rule in India, especially in the Patna Division in Bihar between c.1870–1920. It traces the economic influence of British policies and maps the impact of legal, administrative and scientific interventions to rural conditions and norms in the state. The book discusses British theories and policies of ‘improvement’, comparing them with Bihar’s agricultural practice and socio-economic conditions to draw conclusions about rural impoverishment. Following on from his earlier book, Ancient Rights and Future Comfort on the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885, the author also presents case studies on famines, debts, canal and village irrigation, flood-protection and the cultivation and production of indigo, opium and sugar. He analyses extensive archival material to reflect on property law, scientific interventions, cropping patterns, trade and intermediaries. He examines the economic role of governments, Eurocentric development theories and the complex impact of development policy on agriculture and society in Bihar. The book will be of interest to academics and students of colonial history, modern Indian history, agrarian studies, economic history, sociology, and development studies. It will also be useful to development practitioners and researchers working on the history of agrarian conditions and public policy.
Download or read book Local Agrarian Societies in Colonial India written by Kaoru Sugihara and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first systematic attempt to introduce a full range of Japanese scholarship on the agrarian history of British India to the English-language reader. Suggests the fundamental importance of an Asian comparative perspective for the understanding of Indian history.
Download or read book The Great Agrarian Conquest written by Neeladri Bhattacharya and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2019-09-01 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book TILLING THE LAND written by Deepak Kumar and published by Ratna Sagar. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume sheds light on systems of agricultural knowledge, inherited agricultural practices and allied activities, adoption of new knowledge as well as attempts at modernization, and the involvement and perception of the key historical players and agricultural pioneers who initiated the process of transformation of the system of agrarian production and the creation of a new agrarian knowledge base against the backdrop of burgeoning Western scientific knowledge. Going beyond the scope of work of those who have written agrarian histories of colonial India focussing primarily on issues related to control over land, organization of agrarian production, agrarian relations, rural credit and agrarian commercial network, this volume attempts to examine the productionist discourse in the colonial period as well as throws new light on hitherto unexplored issues related to the colonial impact on indigenous agrarian systems.
Download or read book Credit Markets and the Agrarian Economy of Colonial India written by Sugata Bose and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study draws on a variety of historiographical approaches to explore a theme central to all discussions of the colonial economy in India. Bose considers such questions as why peasants borrowed, how credit intruded into peasants' lives and transformed their world, how we may most usefully characterize the relationship between peasants and usurers, and how debtors perceive their creditors.
Download or read book Peasant History of Late Pre colonial and Colonial India written by B. B. Chaudhuri and published by Pearson Education India. This book was released on 2008 with total page 988 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Agrarian Transformation in Western India written by B. B. Mohanty and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2018-10-11 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the economic gains and social costs of agrarian transformation in India. The author looks at three phases of agrarian transformation: colonial, post- colonial, and neoliberal. This work combines macro and micro economic data, economic and noneconomic phenomena, and quantitative and qualitative aspects while exploring the context of historical and contemporary changes with special reference to Maharashtra in western India. It discusses regional disparities in agricultural development, issues of modernisation and social inequality, land owning among scheduled castes and tribes, women in agriculture, pattern of labour migration and farmer’s suicides, and documents the experiences and conditions of the rural poor and socially weaker sections to provide a comprehensive understanding of the significant changes in agrarian rural economy of western India. It also discusses contemporary development policy and practices and their consequences. Lucid and topical, this volume will be useful to scholars and researchers of agrarian studies, rural sociology, social history, agricultural economics, development studies, political economy, political studies, and public policy, as well as planning and policy experts.
Download or read book Capital Interrupted written by Vinay K. Gidwani and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The central Gujarat region of western India is home to the entrepreneurial landowning Patel caste who have leveraged their rural dominance to become a powerful global diaspora of merchants, industrialists, and professionals. Investigating the Patels’ intriguing ascent, Vinay Gidwani analyzes its broad implications for the nature of labor and capital worldwide. With the Patels as his central case, Gidwani interrogates established concepts of value, development, and the relationship between capital and history. Capitalism, he argues, is not a frame of economic organization based on the smooth, consistent operation of a series of laws, but rather an assemblage of contingent and interrupted logics stitched together into the appearance of a deus ex machina. Following this line of thinking, Gidwani points to ways in which political economy might be freed of its lingering Eurocentrism, raises questions about the adequacy of postcolonial studies’ critique of Marx and capitalism, and opens the possibility of situating capitalism as a geographically uneven social formation in which different normative or value-creating practices are imperfectly sutured together in ways that can equally impair and enable profit and accumulation. Both theoretically astute and empirically informed, Capital, Interrupted unsettles encrusted understandings of staple concepts within the human sciences such as hegemony, governmentality, caste, and agency and, ultimately, does nothing less than rethink the very constitution of capitalism. Vinay Gidwani is associate professor of geography and global studies at the University of Minnesota.
Download or read book Agrarian and Other Histories written by Shubhra Chakrabarti and published by . This book was released on 2019-05-28 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is no area of Indian agrarian history that Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri has not traversed. This volume considers his work on the peasantry and the political economy of agriculture in eastern India, including the process of 'depeasantization' and the forcible induction of tribes and forest dwellers into settled agriculture.
Download or read book The Peasant and the Raj written by Eric Stokes and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1978-03-23 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These twelve essays explore the nature of south Asian agrarian society and examine the extent to which it changed during the period of British rule. The central focus of the book is directed to peasant agitation and violence and four of the studies look at the agrarian explosion that formed the background to the 1857 Mutiny. The essays give a coherent historical treatment of the Indian peasant world, and the paperback edition of this successful book will be of interest to the student of peasant studies and to the sociologist as well as to development economists and agronomists generally.
Download or read book Political Economy of Agricultural Development in India written by Akina Venkateswarlu and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-17 with total page 569 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book covers Indian agricultural development from the colonial to the present period. It examines how ruling class political ideology determined the agricultural policies from colonial rule. It considers both quantitative and qualitative aspects in all periods: colonial period to pre-green revolution phase, post-green revolution phase (early and late stages) and post-globalisation phase after 1991. India has achieved the ability to maintain food security, through enough food grain buffer stocks to meet the enormous public distribution system. But, with India’s entry into WTO in 1994, euphoria has been created among all types of farmers to adopt commercial crops like cotton cost-intensive inputs. Even food grain crops are grown through use of costly irrigation and chemicalised inputs. But they lacked remunerative prices, and so farmers began to commit suicides, which crossed 3.5 lakh. Government of India attributed this agrarian crisis to the technology fatigue and gave scope for second green revolution (GR-II). GR-I was achieved by public sector enterprise, whereas the GR-II as gene revolution is a result of private sector enterprise/MNCs. There is fear that opening up of the sector may lead to handover of the family farms to big agri-multinationals. GOI’s proposal to double farmers’ income by 2022 is feasible only when the problems, being faced by small, marginal and tenant farmers, are addressed in agricultural marketing, credit and extension services. Now, it is time to go for suitable forms of cooperative/collective agriculture, as 85 percent of total cultivators are the small and marginal farmers. This book is co-published with Aakar Books, New Delhi. Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the print versions of this book in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
Download or read book Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital written by Sugata Bose and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1993-03-11 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical work of synthesis and interpretation of agrarian change in India over the long term.
Download or read book The Economy of Modern India written by B. R. Tomlinson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-25 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique examination of the development of the modern Indian economy over the past 150 years.
Download or read book Colonialism in Action written by Debdas Banerjee and published by Orient Blackswan. This book was released on 1999 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book provides an analysis of the historical origins of the problems of development as rooted firmly in the colonial trade and discusses the ways in which the rich-poor dichotomy was propogated and perpetuated.
Download or read book Colonial and Post colonial Origins of Agrarian Development written by Shahram Azhar and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study explores the colonial and post-colonial origins of agrarian development by looking at the role of historical institutions, class formations and the state (ICS) in shaping the process. It contributes to the "divergence debates" in economics, which make an attempt to explain the 'fundamental causes' of divergence between countries. While one strand of the divergence literature presents the process as being functional to 'geography', a second strand focuses on the institutional legacies of colonialism; what is common to both sets of explanations, however, is the view that future outcomes are completely pre-determined by one or another time-invariant factor, leading implicitly to the view that third-world countries are in fact prisoners of birth. This study challenges this assumption by pointing to the crucial role that is played by a third factor--- the agency of the post-colonial state and agrarian public policy---in mitigating the negative impact of inheriting a particularly bad geography or the misfortune of being colonized at a point in history. To do this, the study utilizes the natural experiment of the partition of the Punjab region in South Asia between India and Pakistan in 1947. While the two sides inherited relatively similar initial conditions---and hence must have converged given the 'geography' or 'colonial institutions' models of economic development---yet, a reversal of economic fortunes has taken place, so that the districts assigned to Indian Punjab systematically outperform the districts that were assigned to Pakistan at the time of partition. What explains this divergence? The study provides an answer to this conundrum by examining the evolution of institutional structures in each Punjab during the two qualitatively distinct periods, and in particular paying attention to the differential paths of post-colonial public policy across the two sides. The two-dimensional framework---with two distinct time periods (pre and post independence) and two states (Indian and Pakistani Punjab)--- allows me to build a much more holistic understanding of ICS and their colonial and post-colonial origins than is possible by looking at individual social formations without a counterfactual. Specifically, the study borrows an analogy from the empirical behavioral sciences where "twin studies" are often employed to differentiate between the impacts of "nature versus nurture". Here, I employ a similar technique to separate out the impact of 'historical' and 'geographical' factors, from the role played by 'post-colonial state policy' in shaping current agricultural outcomes in the two Punjabs. Using this research design and original archival research on colonial records and statistical manuals, I design an exceptionally long panel data set on district-wise agricultural production and acreage, along with data on colonial transformation, infrastructural development, market formations and property rights, to show how colonial institutions shaped class structures in the twin states, and how these react back on the economy and the post-colonial state by shaping the investment choices (and yield achieved per unit land) of farmers in each Punjab. I pay specific attention to the institutional structure as being shaped by a "colonial entitlement system": a complex product of class (as the organization of surplus in an economy) and power (organization of power) relations distributed by the colonial state. The study points to two 'critical junctures' in institutional history that shaped the evolution of the entitlement system during and after the colonial period. The first, beginning with the American Civil War in 1861 led to a severing of the existing global supply chain of cotton, which in turn, led to the emergence of Punjab as an alternative feeder of raw cotton to the empire. An 'institutional apparatus' was required to achieve this aim. The evolution of this apparatus came about, I argue, as a result of the contradictory goals of economic transformation (in infrastructure) and the maintenance of political order. The second period begins in 1947, where the Indian side of Punjab was exposed to a series of land reforms while the Pakistani side was not. In addition, the political structure across the two states varied substantially, with the Indian side having a much more democratic structure than its Pakistani twin. As a result of these differences, the two sides can essentially be seen as being divided into two 'institutional islands' with the people on each side having access to the institutions of just one of the two states. This produced two qualitatively different 'class controls' over the post-colonial states in each case, and its economic impact is assessed in the study by devising a Difference-in-Difference strategy to ask: To what extent are differences in the post-independence agricultural yield per unit land of districts assigned to one of the two Punjabs by the Boundary Commission of 1947 shaped by 1) their colonial history, specifically the institutional structures and class-formations inherited due to colonial transformation and 2) the set of post-colonial developments, respectively, that these districts were exposed to as a result of them being assigned to one of the two states, while holding the effects of agroclimatic variables and geography constant. The study concludes that it is a combination of 'institutional' reform and the 'class essence' of that reform that determines agrarian performance in post-colonial societies.
Download or read book Indigenous and Colonial Origins of Comparative Economic Development The Case of Colonial India and Africa written by Christopher Alan Bayly and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2012 with total page 37 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract: This paper concerns the institutional origins of economic development, emphasizing the cases of nineteenth-century India and Africa. Colonial institutions-the law, western style property rights, newspapers and statistical analysis-played an important part in the emergence of Indian public and commercial life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These institutions existed in the context of a state that was extractive and yet dependent on indigenous cooperation in many areas, especially in the case of the business class. In such conditions, Indian elites were critical in creating informal systems of peer-group education, enhancing aspiration through the use of historicist and religious themes and in creating a "benign sociology" of India as a prelude to development. Indigenous ideologies and practices were as significant in this slow enhancement of Indian capabilities as transplanted colonial ones. Contemporary development specialists would do well to consider the merits of indigenous forms of association and public debate, religious movements and entrepreneurial classes. Over much of Asia and Africa, the most successful enhancement of people's capabilities has come through the action of hybrid institutions of this type.
Download or read book Law and the Economy in Colonial India written by Tirthankar Roy and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-09-20 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By accessibly recounting and analyzing the unique experience of institutions in colonial Indiawhich were influenced heavily by both British Common Law and indigenous Indian practices and traditionsLaw and the Economy in Colonial India sheds new light on what exactly fosters the types of institutions that have been key to economic development throughout world history more generally. The culmination and years of research, the book goes through a range of examples, including textiles, opium, tea, indigo, tenancy, credit, and land mortgage, to show how economic laws in colonial India were shaped neither by imported European ideas about how colonies should be ruled nor indigenous institutions, but by the practice of producing and trading. The book is an essential addition to Indian history and to some of the most fundamental questions in economic history."
