The Great Agrarian Conquest: The Colonial Reshaping of a Rural World

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, 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, Bhattacharya shows, is as much conceptual as material. Agrarian colonisation 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 colonisation was in this sense a deep conquest.