social structure and agrarian economy in the late eighteenth century

383 Pages·2017·18.04 MB·English

Abbreviations
Add.Ms.: Additional Manuscripts
BDR: Bengal District Records, Calcutta, various dates.
BPC: Bengal Public Consultations
BRC: Bengal Revenue Consultations.
BRFW: Proceedings of the Board of Revenue at Fort William.
Brit.Mus.: British Museum.
BRP: Bengal Board of Revenue Proceedings.
BR Misc.: Proceedings of the Board of Revenue
(Miscellaneous)
CPC: Calendar of Persian Correspondence, Calcutta, various
dates.
CCR: Proceedings of the Calcutta Committee of Revenue
CCRM: Proceedings of the Controlling Council of Revenue at
Murshidabad
Circuit: Proceedings of the Committees of Circuit.
Coast & Bay: Letters From Coast & Bay
Committee: Proceedings of the Controlling Committee of
Revenue
FR: Factory Records.
FR 2: The Fifth Report on the Affairs of the East India
Company. Volume II, ed.W.K.Firminger, Calcutta, 1917.
Grain: Proceedings of the Board of Revenue, Grain Branch.
Home Misc.: Home Miscellaneous
IOL/IOR: India Office Library/Records.
Khalsa: Proceedings of the Board of Revenue, Khalsa Branch.
LCB: Letter Copy Books of the Resident at the Darbar.
Ms. /Mss.: Manuscripts
PCR: Proceedings of the Provincial Councils of Revenue.
PP: Parliamentary Papers. Reports from the Comrn.it tees of
the House of Commons.
WBDR. n.s: West Bengal District Records. New Series,
Calcutta, various dates.
WBSA: West Bengal State Archives, Calcutta.
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Preface
This thesis is an analysis of rural Bengal, its social
structure and agrarian economy, in the late eighteenth
century, Ca. 1765 to Ca.1794 on the basis of the revenue
records and other papers of the English East India Company
and Its officials. Obviously, the sole dependence on
Company records means that the conclusions remain largely
tentative till a more substantive reconstruction is
attempted by using indigenous sources too. Nevertheless,
the Company archives are by far the largest single body of
evidence available on the economic history of Bengal. They
also contain vast amounts of hitherto unutilized
information on the essential elements which shaped the
fabric of rural society and economy: dearth and famine,
landed property, the peasantry, agricultural production and
local trade.
The central purpose of the ensuing discussion is to
demonstrate that Bengal underwent an unprecedented degree
of commercialization in this period. There is no doubt that
in previous decades the province was pervaded by intricate
commercial networks linked to the trade in textiles. Later
(i.e., in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) Bengal
went through a significantly new commercial phase under the
Impact of indigo, jute and tea. Nevertheless, there seems
to be a strong case to argue that while the early
eighteenth century textile-based commerce set the tone of
a long-wave of commercialization, it was the late
eighteenth century which provided the distinctive departure
by bringing about the commercialization of the province's
rice producing economy and of the social relations which
were embedded in it. The clearest indications of these
developments are the rapid proliferation of a sharecropping
8
peasantry in this period (discussed in chapter 4) and the
increasing intervention of the grain-merchant (byapari) in
agricultural production (see chapter 6). Many factors
contributed to this development-- demand, prices, revenue,
dearth and famines-- which are discussed in chapter 1, and
the details of the process, both social and economic, are
discussed in subsequent chapters. The diffuse strands of my
argument are then tied together in chapter 7.
The fact that there exists a fairly rich
historiography for Bengal in this period necessitates that
any discussion must, among other things, engage in a
dialogue with it. Therefore, one of the purposes of this
thesis is to correct some imbalances in the existing
interpretations. Three areas have been identified where
such imbalances exist.
First, there is an excessive preoccupation with the
revenue administration of the East India Company. I argue
(in chapter 1) that revenue by itself does not explain much
about the economy. It has to be situated in the context of
agricultural production for any kind of comprehensibility
to emerge.
Second, there is the question of famines and dearth.
The sole concern of historians so far has been with the
disastrous impact of the famine of 1769/70 on, what is
seen, as an economy based on traditional forms of
subsistence security. This thesis argues that the intensity
of the famine of 1769/70 was significantly less than what
has been hitherto argued. It is also suggested that the
events of 1769/70 have to be situated in relation to other
famine and dearth years in order to study the consequences
of harvest-failures in a commercialized economy where
access to food was determined, not by traditional
subsistence-security systems, but by the fluctuations in
food-supply and market-prices.
The third area of historiographical disagreement is
over the questions of peasant-society and stratification.
This thesis disagrees with the views which argue the
9
existence of a rich peasant "class" in the late eighteenth
century and the increasing bargaining power of a mobile
peasantry after the famine of 1769/70. What is suggested
instead (in chapter 4) is the existence of a largely
undifferentiated peasantry operating under extremely
resource-constrained circumstances which proved conducive
for the penetration of non-peasant strata (the landed
proprietors and the byapari) into peasant production, which
appears as the distinctive feature of the late eighteenth
century commercialization in Bengal.
It is also necessary to state what this thesis does
not attempt to do. There is very little in the subsequent
pages about land-revenue administration, the role of the
East India Company or about the "drain of wealth" from
Bengal. These have been touched upon only to the extent of
tracing their influences on the actual workings of the
rural economy. They have not been dealt with as separate
problems. The reasons are twofold. First, the major
contours of these matters are fairly well established.
Second, there is an absolute necessity of going beyond
these issues in order to reconstruct the structures on
which these administrative and exploitative edifices were
based. This is not to deny the central purpose of the
Company's rule after 1765, which was to use Bengal's
resources for complex commercial, military and political
purposes, but to study that exploitation (undoubtedly one
of the dominant themes of extant historiography) divorced
from the material milieu of production seems a largely
pointless exercise.
There is also very little in this thesis about the
cultivation of the "cash crops" such as mulberry, opium or
indigo. These were commercial products par excellence, and
their vicissitudes have been quite exhaustively documented
by other historians. Additionally, these were more closely
associated with the International movements of Asian trade.
My concern is with those commodities which had the most
direct bearing on the daily lives of the people. Chapter 5
10
therefore is an attempt to reconstruct the patterns of
production of crops related most closely to the Internal
market of Bengal. Cotton has figured in this chapter
because it was essentially designed for internal
consumption despite the international demand for piece-
goods. Ninety percent of Bengal's cotton cloth was
manufactured to supply Indian markets (see chapter 6). By
contrast, silk was almost entirely an export commodity.
This is clearly in evidence from the declining trend in
Bengal's silk exports to Surat between 1765 and 1789 and
the rising trend in the Company's investment for that
commodity between 1765 and 1780. These are outlined in
figure A (p.11).
Unpublished and contemporary printed works have been
given full citations in the footnotes, while secondary
sources are cited in the following fashion- - name of
author, year of publication followed by the page, or
chapter, number. Full references are provided in the
bibliography. Place names have been corrected (e.g.,
Rungpore to Rangpur) except when they figure in quotations
or specific references. For instance, Dacca has been
referred as Dhaka in the text, but the old name is retained
where ever it occurs in the records or in quotations.
My debt of gratitude to numerous scholars for their
help and encouragement is enormous. Professor P.J.Marshall
supervised this thesis. This work is a small token of
gratitude for his sharp insight, patience and kindness.
Professor Burton Stein, Professor David Arnold, Dr.Terry
Byres and Dr.Peter Robb gave my ideas the benefit of their
sharp comments. They were also ungrudgingly generous with
their time and friendship. Professor Harbans Mukhia, my
teacher of long-standing, nurtured my initial attempts at
historical research and sustained it with his constant
interest in my work.
The Association of Commonwealth Universities and the
British Council provided me with the opportunity of
researching in England for three years. The Trustees of the
11
BENGAL SILK,1765-1789
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iisass •iss ••i•ii 7273747575 yiis 7,5011 as as $4 sass ii as as
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0 EXPORTS TO $URAT + COMPANY I NVE$TMENT$
FIGURE A
Source: Surat, IOL Mss. Eur.D. 281, f.14; Company
investment, PP. Ninth Report. 1783, p.112.
University of London Historical Trust Fund gave me
financial assistance towards the costs of producing the
thesis. I am grateful to these organizations. The members
ofthe British Museum Library and the India Office Library
provided the documents for my research with great kindness
and efficiency.
Ratna and Rhea saw me through me with their love and
understanding. My parents encouraged me with their constant
affection and blessings. It is only appropriate that this
thesis be dedicated to them.
CHAPTER 1
A Framework for Bengal's Agrarian Economy in the Late
Eighteenth Century
For too long existing historiography has tended to
view the late eighteenth century in Bengal as a period of
crisis when the supposed agricultural prosperity under the
Nizamat was irrevocably halted by a combination of state
(i.e. the East India Company's) exploitation and the
disastrous famine of 1769/70, an event, which according to
consensual wisdom, decimated 10 million people or one-third
of the province's population and unleashed a prolonged
agricultural recession. The essential focus of such studies
therefore hinges around the quantum of revenue imposed and
collected by the state and not on the actual operation of
the agrarian economy. Therefore what is characterized as
the economic history of the province is actually its
revenue history, or at best a history of changes in the
structure of landed property between 1765 and 1793'. While
there is no denying the important role performed by the
revenue squeeze in the provincial economy, there is a
pressing need to contextualize that role in the overall
framework of economic, mainly agricultural, production.
Revenue is a form in which the surplus is appropriated by
the state, but it is the mode in which that surplus is
created which provides the crucial insight into the domain
of production.
This is not to say that the entire range of history
writing for this period is encapsulated in matters
pertaining to revenue. Laudable efforts were made by
' N.K.Sinha,1968;B.B.Chaudhury,1983:86ff.
13
Ratnalekha and Rajat Ray to lift the dead-weight of state-
taxation in an attempt to reconstruct the network of social
relations which constituted Bengal's agrarian economy. From
a description of land tenure they shifted our focus into
Bengal's economic and social structure and to rural power
configurations. The picture of agrarian society which
emerged from their studies was of a society polarized into
two contending classes, the zamfndar and the jotedar. The
latter category was variously described by them as the
"village landlord" or a rich peasant "class" whose
foundations were laid in the economic boom of the early
eighteenth century, but who actually came into full form in
the late eighteenth century because of the revenue policies
of the East India Company and the dislocation caused by the
famine of 1769/702.
The thesis proposed by Ratnalekha and Rajat Ray is
provocative and analytically stimulating, but one which
nevertheless embodies a number of historical problems. I
have developed a critique of their model elsewhere3.
Briefly, their analysis poses four essential problems.
First, their view that the jotedar was an established
social class in the late eighteenth century tends to read
the situation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
into the eighteenth with very little historical
justification. Second, their assumption that a rich peasant
"class" actually existed in the late eighteenth century is
not borne out by the sources. Third, they have very little
to say about the actual milieu of agricultural production
while discussing the emergence of the jotedars over two
centuries of British rule in Bengal and their sources for
the eighteenth century are confined to two districts (those
of Rangpur and Dinajpur) where a jotedarl-type social
relation seems to have emerged in an extremely rudimentary
2
See Ratnalekha Ray, 1979; Rajat and Ratnalekha
Ray,1975;Rajat Ray,1988.
R.Datta,1989.
14
form. Fourth, their suggestion that Bengal's agrarian
social structure was composed of two contending social
classes positioned over a mass of landless and low-caste
peasantry is misleading, not only for its convenient
simplicity but also for its almost total absence of
historical evidence. I shall return to all these issues
when discussing the problem of peasant stratification in
chapter 4 of this thesis.
There is therefore a pressing need to analyze the
specifics of Bengal's rural economy in the late eighteenth
century but within a conceptual framework which creates a
meaningful context in which that economy operated. Thus the
essential idea of this chapter is to construct some points
of reference and conceptual parameters in order to
establish a context for the analysis of Bengal's agrarian
economy in our period. It is, in other words, an exercise
in establishing a central point of reference which will set
the tone for the issues to be discussed in the subsequent
chapters.
An agenda for the study of late eighteenth century Bengal
The central purpose of this dissertation is to suggest
that late eighteenth century Bengal (Ca. 1765 to Ca.
1794) underwent a number of structural changes in its
agricultural economy and rural society. These changes were
caused by a conjuncture, in this period, between four
crucial factors. The first factor was the revenue regime
established in the province after 1765. The second one was
the changing linkages between the state and the market
brought about by the political transition in the province.
The third component was the growing demand for food in the
province, and the fourth element in the conjuncture was an
apparently fortuitous cluster of dearth and famine years
15
between 1769 and 1793. The order in which these factors
have been listed does not reflect each one's hierarchical
importance in the conjuncture, but it is intended to
delineate the political and the economic in that
configuration of forces and events which shaped Bengal's
economic life in our period. The net result of this
conjuncture, I propose, was to lead the province into one
of its most intense phases of commercialization, the
uniqueness of which was the commercialization of its rice
producing small-peasant economy
The general tendency, implicit in the works of
historians like N. K. Sinha and B.B.Chaudhury, is to view
this period as antithetical to the commercialization of
Bengal's agrarian economy. Commercialization of
agricultural production is therefore located in those
sectors (like opium and indigo) which were structurally
linked to a world market4. S.Bhattacharya's study of
marketing structures and internal trade in eastern India5
is an excellent attempt to analyze the processes of
commercialization which were set in motion by internal
trade (itself a long neglected subject in Bengal's
historiography) but his study is nevertheless limited by an
overt emphasis on the autonomous role of trade largely
dissociated from the context of agricultural production, or
from the forces which influenced the ebb and flow of
commodities in the market and the strategies which were
designed by the merchants to reduce the inconvenience which
these fluctuations could cause to them.
On the other hand we have the tendency to see
commercialization as a state-induced phenomenon. This
approach is epitomized in Irfan Habib's writings on the
society and economy of medieval India. For Habib, the
crucial variables in India's pre-colonial economy are the
state's drive towards increasing centralization and the
B.B.Chaudhury,1967.
S.Bhattacharya,1983.