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The passing of the Government of India Act by the British Parliament in August 1935 opened a new phase in nationalist politics. The Congress started a gradual transformation from a movement of agitation into a parliamentary party and became a party of government in July 1937 when it formed ministries in most of the provinces of India. Indian capitalists took advantage of this ongoing transformation to forge closer links with the nationalist party. However, the process of rapprochement was slow and many obstacles remained on the road to a full-scale alliance between big business and the Congress. Reforms Party or moderate Congress? The capitalist dilemma in 1935–1936 Although the new Constitution fell short of even the minimal demands put forward by most factions of Indian big business, businessmen saw possibilities of using some of its provisions to their own advantage. Provincial autonomy was the most promising aspect of the 1935 reforms. There was a chance that the new provincial governments would be pursuing a more active economic policy than the dyarchy governments, thus creating more opportunities for Indian business interests to expand. But what would be the political complexion of these governments? Would the Congress agree to play the game, and take part in the provincial elections that would be held after some time? What would be its performance at the polls? In case of victories, would it agree to form governments which would have to act within the framework of a constitution it rejected? By mid-1935 nobody had an answer to these questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The East India Company inherited on a greatly magnified scale the conflict between state entrepreneurship – the desire to squeeze up land revenue or create monopolies – and the entrepreneurship of merchant and peasant which had bedevilled many eighteenth-century Indian kingdoms. The result for the British was a long period of economic lethargy which was barely obscured by the slow introduction of the panoply of the modern state. Yet this should not be taken to imply that the early nineteenth century was an era devoid of significant social change. On the contrary, as this chapter will show, these years were critical in the creation of the modern Indian peasantry, its patterns of social divisions and its beliefs. Many early Victorian writers were convinced that India was on the brink of a rapid transformation. Hinduism was fading in the face of evangelical Christianity; ‘caste disabilities’ suffered by the lower orders would disappear in the face of good laws; the ‘isolation’ of the Indian village would be blown apart by the impact of industrialisation. Writers in the second half of the twentieth century have dissented. Some have argued that the subcontinent was condemned to stagnation by its subjection to colonial interests – that society was frozen into caricatures of its feudal past by British land-revenue systems and the destruction of its artisan producers. Others have argued that colonial rule was peripheral to most of Indian society: it could effect changes neither for good nor ill because the new export trades were fitful and the waves of reform and regeneration were merely paper debates conducted in the corridors of Government House, Calcutta. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The histories of western and central mainland Southeast Asia were closely joined and reasonably comparable. The central mainland is here defined as present-day Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and more peripherally, the Mekong delta. Although in fact communications between this region and China were at least as easy as with South Asia, from an early date India and Sri Lanka provided the central, no less than the western, mainland with its chief high cultural inspiration. The broad similarities between the western and central mainland in art, literature, law, kingship, and Theravada affiliation that grew from this common South Asian exposure were reinforced by a constant west-central exchange. Monks, diplomats, traders, soldiers, and migrants showed that upland barriers between the Irrawaddy, Chaophraya, and Mekong river systems were relatively porous. Thus a unique Theravada civilization embracing virtually all wet-rice areas in the western and central mainland cohered and diverged from the ever more Sinic eastern sector. To these shared cultural traditions must be added the unifying effects of demography and geography, particularly in what became the two chief Theravada kingdoms, Burma and Siam. In both kingdoms a semicircle of highlands surrounded a great alluvial plain whose chief river, the Irrawaddy or Chaophraya, provided the main avenue of communication. In both sectors a maritime coastal region competed with a less commercially privileged interior zone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our detailed examination of mainland history begins with the western sector of the mainland in part because it is convenient to proceed west to east and in part because here I am best able to address regional conundrums with indigenous-language primary sources. Moreover, insofar as any sector can be representative of so varied a region, the western mainland has a good claim. In duration and degree, for example, post-charter disruptions were intermediate between those of the central and eastern mainland. The same may be said of intrasectoral tensions: Upper Burma reemerged as the dominant zone within the western mainland in the 1630s. This was long after Ayudhya had established its preeminence in the central mainland, but almost 170 years before Hue gained a secure authority along the yet more fragmented eastern littoral. As elsewhere, political change had a cyclic character: periodic breakdowns encouraged administrative reform, but reformed administrations collapsed before destabilizing economic growth, external attacks, and domestic factionalism. Whenever the capital region was in trouble, restive provinces were quick to magnify its difficulties. Thus Lower Burma exploited Upper Burma's problems in the 1280s and 1740s, and when the south faltered in the late 1500s, Upper Burma returned the favor. With the interior home to Burmans and the south to Mons, endemic north–south tensions had an irreducible, if fluid, ethnic component. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1792 the French monarchy collapsed. Between 1799 and 1815, a new Parisian regime improved the efficiency and penetration of the central apparatus, while dramatically extending French military power. Short-lived though France's conquests were, her continental wars precipitated imitative reforms of administrative and military structures across Europe and a permanent reduction in the number of independent states. Between 1752 and 1786 the Burmese, Siamese, and Vietnamese kingdoms all disintegrated. In each realm, a new, more dynamic leadership then succeeded in quelling the chaos, increasing the resources and local authority of the state, and enlarging its territorial writ. The ensuing wars between reinvigorated empires in the late 18th and early 19th centuries accelerated competitive reform while diminishing the number of independent polities across mainland Southeast Asia. How shall we explain these parallels between Europe and Southeast Asia? Surely, one is tempted to say, no explanation is needed: the cultural contexts were so different, the interstate and domestic systems so unique, the trajectories so disparate as to render parallels ultimately meaningless. This is historical flotsam, curious but basically random coincidences, like similarities between Meso-American and Egyptian pyramids or between Jewish and Buddhist cosmogonic explanations for the origin of suffering. But closer scrutiny suggests rather more was involved. In fact, in mainland Southeast Asia as well as in France, the late 18th and early 19th centuries ended the third and inaugurated the last of four roughly synchronized cycles of political consolidation that together spanned the better part of a millennium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern Bengal's agrarian history was forged at the points of contest and compromise between the colonial state and the dominant land-holding and capital-controlling classes on the one hand and the subordinate sectors of smallholding and labouring society on the other. A combination of material need and culturally informed value of the smallholding and landless labouring majority generated imperatives which challenged those deriving from the colonial, land-holding and capital-controlling establishment. The demands of smallholders and labourers for subsistence, security and social conditions reflective of their notion of human dignity sought to resist and restructure relations governing access to land, work, consumption and production imposed upon them. The course of agrarian history was influenced by an undercurrent of everyday resistance to inequities and periodic surges of effective resistance which dismantled the established structures of domination. The older historiography of agrarian India generally privileged the landed and the powerful. Recent trends in scholarship have aimed at restoring to the subordinate social groups their ‘subjecthood’ in the making of history. Reacting against the concentration on insurgency or the dramatic instances of revolt in the literature on resistance, some writers have begun to stress the importance of the less ubiquitous but more frequent acts of defiance. Yet, paradoxically, an over-emphasis on the everyday processes of contest and compromise might obfuscate the reality of social dominance and leave a less than accurate impression of the ‘active’ agency of labour resistance contributing to a form of social equilibrium. Moreover, everyday resistance along class lines to ensure subsistence from the peasant smallholding often entailed implicit complicity in domination along lines of gender and generation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The labour process in agrarian production marked by its predominantly familial character was encumbered by various forms of appropriation imposed upon it. The colonial state, local landlords, metropolitan capitalists, indigenous merchants and moneylenders, and richer peasants were among the many claimants of the surplus produced by the working peasantry. The aim of those who lorded over landed rights and controlled the circuits of capital was to hold down, with the assistance of those who wielded state power, the share of labour in the total social product. Several mechanisms of extracting the surplus were available and generally deployed simultaneously. Yet, while the social organization of production displayed a strong strand of continuity despite important elements of qualitative change, the principal modes of exploitation and relations of appropriation underwent more decisive transitions over the two centuries following the onset of colonial rule. The extraction of surplus value produced by peasant labour in the forms of rent, interest and profit occurred during the century following the grant of the Diwani to the Company in 1765 within a primary framework of the colonial state's land revenue demand. The Permanent Settlement of the land revenue with the zamindars of Bengal in 1793 was designed to ensure the security and stability of the state's main source of income. As the votaries of free trade got the better of defenders of the Company's monopoly in the 1810s, the need for remittances was added to the major concern about fiscal strength. An assessment of the early experience in Bengal and the new ideological currents of the nineteenth century led colonial administrators to institute varying sorts of land revenue systems in other regions of India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians of colonial India have been puzzled lately by the mismatch between the rapid expansion of commodity production for a capitalist world market on the one hand, and low levels of productive investment in agriculture and an apparent continuity in non-capitalist agrarian social structures on the other. The sense of bewilderment is itself a scholarly advance from ‘traditions’ set in the later nineteenth century which saw markets, agricultural investment and agrarian relations as themes fit for separate enquiry. Needless to say, this led to ‘debates’ about the economic results of colonialism marked by a peculiar absence of dialogue. Yet even the more perceptive scholars have continued to harbour teleological assumptions about capitalist transformation. This has led some to declare that the ‘ultimate’ dominance of capitalism denotes, willy-nilly, some form of capitalist mode of production in agriculture. Others, convinced that what they see in the rural areas is a ‘semi-feudal’ or simply a ‘peasant’ mode of production, have been concerned with identifying the ‘obstacles’ or ‘impediments’ in the way of capitalism bearing full sway. Consequently, the much-needed probe into the analytics of the relationship between capitalist ‘development’ under colonialism and agrarian continuity or change has been almost always slightly off the mark. Arguments about continuity in agrarian relations during colonial rule have rested generally, if not purely, on descriptive rather than analytical categories. It has been found acceptable to compare, for instance, levels of peasant differentiation or landlessness at the beginning and at the end of the colonial era. The descriptive approach has tended to obscure subtle but very real processes of change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agrarian history at its most elementary level is the story of the interaction between land and people. The changing relationship between varying numbers of human beings and a fixed quantity of land has been from time immemorial a simple but crucial dynamic in agrarian developments. Historical reality has rarely been quite so simple as to be captured within a single relationship of a variable and a constant. Too many things other than population change, and land, despite its appearance, does not lack movement. Besides, the power of simplicity often misleads; it is all too easy to overemphasize the demographic factor in agrarian history. Demography nevertheless is important, not necessarily as a causal determinant of the nature and course of agrarian developments but as a defining principle of parameters within which rural production occurs. Putting demography in its place is a daunting task. To the extent that historians have made contributions to grand theory in the twentieth century, studies of the long-term in pre-industrial history in which demographic cycles loom large have been, more often than not, the empirical vehicle for theoretical interjection. The Annales school of historians in particular has lent this genre both sophistication and the status of orthodoxy. What is more, the part of the world that is the subject of this book is precisely one of those many regions in the ‘developing’ world where the ‘problem’ of population is especially acute. In 1770, the starting-point of this study, the agrarian scene in Bengal was marked by the scarcity of people and vast stretches of uncultivated fertile land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]