Local Agrarian Societies in Colonial India

Local Agrarian Societies in Colonial India
Author: Kaoru Sugihara
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 414
Release: 1996
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780700704712

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.

Local Agrarian Societies in Colonial India

Local Agrarian Societies in Colonial India
Author: Peter Robb
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 410
Release: 2013-10-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1136794778

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.

The Great Agrarian Conquest

The Great Agrarian Conquest
Author: Neeladri Bhattacharya
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 544
Release: 2019-09-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1438477414

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.

Bazaar India

Bazaar India
Author: Anand A. Yang
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 332
Release: 1999-02-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780520919969

The role of markets in linking local communities to larger networks of commerce, culture, and political power is the central element in Anand A. Yang's provocative and original study. Yang uses bazaars in the northeast Indian state of Bihar during the colonial period as the site of his investigation. The bazaar provides a distinctive locale for posing fundamental questions regarding indigenous societies under colonialism and for highlighting less familiar aspects of colonial India. At one level, Yang reconstructs Bihar's marketing system, from its central place in the city of Patna down to the lowest rung of the periodic markets. But he also concentrates on the dynamics of exchanges and negotiations between different groups and on what can be learned through the "voices" of people in the bazaar: landholders, peasants, traders, and merchants. Along the way, Yang uncovers a wealth of details on the functioning of rural trade, markets, fairs, and pilgrimages in Bihar. A key contribution of Bazaar India is its many-stranded narrative history of some of South Asia's primary actors over the past two centuries. But Yang's approach is not that of a detached observer; rather, his own voice is engaged with the voices of the past and with present-day historians. By focusing on the world beyond the mud walls of the village, he widens the imaginative geography of South Asian history. Readers with an interest in markets, social history, culture, colonialism, British India, and historiographic methods will welcome his book.

Caste and Equality in India

Caste and Equality in India
Author: Akio Tanabe
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2021-07-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000409333

This book presents an alternative view of caste in Indian society by analysing caste structure and change in local communities in Orissa from historical and anthropological perspectives. Focusing on the agricultural society in the Khurda district of Orissa between the eighteenth century and 2019, the book links discussions on the current transformation of society and politics in India with analyses of long-term historical transformations. The author suggests that, beyond status and power, there is another value which is important in Indian society, namely ontological equality, which functions as the politico-ethical ground for asserting respect and concern for the life of others. The book argues that the value of ontological equality has played an important role in creating and affirming the diverse society which characterises India. It further contends that the movement towards vernacular democracy, which has become conspicuous since the second half of the 1990s, is a historically groundbreaking event which opens a path beyond the postcolonial predicament, supported by the affirmation of diversity by subalterns based on the value of ontological equality. This important contribution to the study of Indian society will be of interest to academics working on the social, political and economic history, sociology, anthropology and political science of South Asia, as well as to those interested in social and political theory.

Law and the Economy in Colonial India

Law and the Economy in Colonial India
Author: Tirthankar Roy
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2016-09-20
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 022638764X

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."

Sustainable Development in India

Sustainable Development in India
Author: Koichi Fujita
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2020-09-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000177432

This book explores and interrogates the food–water–energy nexus, arguably the most crucial factor in sustaining India’s economic development. The book sheds light on different experiences faced in states across India, including the consequences of electricity tariff reforms and related policies on irrigated agriculture. Part 1 focuses on the historical development of agriculture and social change in India, with special reference to the mode of responses and adaptations in social systems against the inherent low and erratic rainfall and resulting water stress in India during the pre-colonial period. Additionally, it investigates how colonial development destroyed social systems and discusses future development prospects. Part 2 discusses contemporary issues of agriculture and social change in India. A comprehensive examination of various important issues related to South Asian agricultural development in the past and in the present, this book will be a valuable reference for researchers of Asian development, sustainable development, environmental policy, South Asian Studies and Development Studies. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

An Agrarian History of South Asia

An Agrarian History of South Asia
Author: David Ludden
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2011-02-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1316025365

Originally published in 1999, David Ludden's book offers a comprehensive historical framework for understanding the regional diversity of agrarian South Asia. Adopting a long-term view of history, it treats South Asia not as a single civilization territory, but rather as a patchwork of agrarian regions, each with their own social, cultural and political histories. The discussion begins during the first millennium, when farming communities displaced pastoral and tribal groups, and goes on to consider the development of territoriality from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Subsequent chapters consider the emergence of agrarian capitalism in village societies under the British, and demonstrate how economic development in contemporary South Asia continues to reflect the influence of agrarian localism. As a comparative synthesis of the literature on agrarian regimes in South Asia, the book promises to be a valuable resource for students of agrarian and regional history as well as of comparative world history.

Contagion and Enclaves

Contagion and Enclaves
Author: Nandini Bhattacharya
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2012-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1846318297

Contagion and Enclaves examines the social history of medicine across two intersecting British enclaves in the major tea-producing region of colonial India: the hill station of Darjeeling and the adjacent tea plantations of North Bengal. Focusing on the establishment of hill sanatoria and other health care facilities and practices against the backdrop of the expansion of tea cultivation and labor migration, it tracks the demographic and environmental transformation of the region and the critical role race and medicine played in it, showing that the British enclaves were essential and distinctive sites of the articulation of colonial power and economy.

The Economy of Modern India

The Economy of Modern India
Author: B. R. Tomlinson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2013-04-25
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1107021189

A unique examination of the development of the modern Indian economy over the past 150 years.