Land tax, property rights and peasant insecurity in colonial India

Bibliographic Data

ID2158979
AuthorsAmiya Kumar Bagchi (a Centre for Studies in Social Sciences , 10 Lake Terrace, Calcutta , 70029 , India, corresponding author)
Year1992
Volume20
Issue1
Pages1-49
Publication date1992-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Journal of Peasant Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0306-6150 • E-ISSN: 1743-9361
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/03066159208438500
OpenAlexW1976725056
LanguageEN
Citations received12
References cited34

The question of private property in land in the Eastern lands including India has been debated in Europe at least since the seventeenth century. It has been claimed that the British rulers had, for the first time, created private property in land and thereby conferred security on the owners. This claim is examined by analysing actually how land laws and land tax in the Bombay Deccan districts operated in the nineteenth century. The intimate relation between land tax and the nature of property rights in India under the British is brought out; and it is shown that British land laws tended to aggravate rather than mitigate the insecurity of peasants in the Bombay Deccan. The withdrawal of the state from public works or affordable loans to the peasants for land improvement was also a factor which exacerbated peasant insecurity and delivered peasants into the usurious net of the moneylenders. The debt process and the relation between ownership of tenure rights, the control over land, and insecure tenancy are examined to show how complex the process could be. Peasant adjustment included the repeated outbreaks of peasant resistance against the British rulers and their local collaborators. The epistemology of the recognition of famine condition is examined, and the claim that population grew at a high rate in the Bombay Deccan in the first quarter of British rule is shown to be questionable. The reasons for failure of schemes for agricultural banking without state support are shown to lie in peasant insecurity associated with land policies followed by the rulers. The case of the Bombay Deccan throws light on the wider issue of how peasant security is subverted in other areas of the world where the problem of a vulnerable ecology and uncertain peasant production is compounded by state policies regarding property rights and taxation

Agriculture · Archaeology · Development economics · Economics · Economy · Famine · Geography · Land law · Land tenure · Leasehold estate · Peasant · Political economy · Political science · Population · Property rights · Sociology · State (computer science · Demography · Land Rights and Reforms · Law · Political Economy and Marxism · Social and Economic Development in India

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