Colonial and Post-Colonial Origins of Agrarian Development

242 Pages·2017·3.45 MB·English

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Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses
November 2016
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Shahram Azhar
University of Massachusetts Amherst
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Azhar, Shahram, "Colonial and Post-Colonial Origins of Agrarian Development: The Case of Two Punjabs"
(2016). Doctoral Dissertations. 726.
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THE COLONIAL AND POST COLONIAL ORIGINS OF
AGRARIAN DEVELOPMENT: A CASE OF TWO PUNJABS

A Dissertation Presented
By
SHAHRAM AZHAR

Submitted to the Graduate School of the
University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
September 2016
Economics
© Copyright by Shahram Azhar 2016
All Rights Reserved
THE COLONIAL AND POST COLONIAL ORIGINS OF
AGRARIAN DEVELOPMENT: A CASE OF TWO PUNJABS
A Dissertation Presented
by
SHAHRAM AZHAR
Approved as to style and content by:

___________________________________________
Mwangi wa Gĩthĩnji, Co-Chair

___________________________________________
Deepankar Basu, Co-Chair

___________________________________________
Priyanka Srivastava, Member

___________________________
Michael Ash, Department Chair
Economics
For Stephen Resnick; a teacher, mentor, and comrade.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This study owes a debt to many people from different parts of the world. I first started thinking
about many of the ideas that eventually took shape here, as an activist in the Anjuman-e-
Mazaareen Punjab, a union of landless peasants in Pakistan. It was via my interactions with these
landless peasants that I first found out about the historical aspects of their oppression, rooted as it
was, in colonial history. These landless ‘non-occupancy’ peasants, migrated from South India in
the late nineteenth century on the promise that their descendants would be given permanent land
rights after exactly one hundred years of the expiry of the temporary lease. Unfortunately,
however, the Musharraf regime reneged on this contract in 1999, forcing the peasantry to adopt
other means of struggle—which continue till the present. I would like to acknowledge and thank
these comrades---who are too numerous to name here--- for the love, support, encouragement,
and above all else---the first-hand information---that they have given me through the process.
The study would be incomplete without the mentoring and support that I received at the
Economics Department of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The department offered an
environment of critical thinking that is difficult to find anywhere else, especially within the
Economics profession. In particular, I would like to thank and dedicate this dissertation to the
memory of our beloved Stephen Resnick who had an enormous epistemological influence. The
dedication and love that he showed toward his students and their development as critical thinkers
was exemplary and for this I cannot thank him enough.
The study owes a great debt to the dissertation committee; Mwangi wa Githinji, for
whom no discussion and no question was trivial, and who constantly encouraged me to challenge
the boundaries of my imagination since the day I joined the Economics department. Mwangi
introduced me to the ideas of post-colonial theory and its impact on agrarian economies. He
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added new dimensions to my thinking by encouraging me to read literature far and beyond the
economics discipline, and for this I owe him a debt of gratitude; Deepankar Basu, who was
always there to help with concretizing ideas, and also helped me enormously with the statistical
modelling in this dissertation; and Priyanka Srivastava, who added the crucial historical
dimension which is usually missing in most economic work. The study would not have been
possible without the critical support of these three people.
I would also like to thank Dr. Ali Cheema at the Lahore University of Management
Sciences (LUMS) and Dr. Takashi Kurosaki the Institute of Economic Research (IER) of
Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo for helping with the collection of colonial, archival datasets.
Other hard copies of the reports that were used to construct the datasets were collected from the
Pakistan Institute of Development Economics and the Federal Bureau of Statistics, in Islamabad.
I also want to acknowledge the support that I received during the course of this study
from family and friends. I could not have sustained the long hours, weeks, and months of data
mining and laborious data-punching from extinct colonial archives without the support of my
wife, Ayesha, who stood beside me, like a comrade and friend throughout the tiring process. I
would also like to thank Vamsi Vakulabaram, Danish Khan, Riko Rosete, and other colleagues at
UMASS who offered critical advice on how to reformulate some of the ideas through important
debates and discussions. To all these people I owe a debt of gratitude.

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ABSTRACT
THE COLONIAL AND POST-COLONIAL ORIGINS OF AGRARIAN
DEVELOPMENT: A CASE OF TWO PUNJABS
SEPTEMBER, 2016
B.Sc (Hons), LAHORE UNIVERSITY OF MANAGEMENT SCIENCES
M.Sc, UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK
Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST
Directed by: Associate Professor Mwangi wa Gĩthĩnji
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
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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.
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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.
Keywords: Economic divergence, Institutional Development, South Asian Economic
History, Colonial Institutions, Post-Colonial Development
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