In 1770, the agrarian scene in Bengal was marked by the scarcity of people and vast stretches of uncultivated fertile land. Two centuries later, land in the west and east Bengals has some of the highest densities of population. The turbulent hydrography of Bengal's great rivers has had a close bearing on the agrarian economy of Bengal. The ecology of the Bakarganj district cut across by numerous streams gave rise to an extraordinary pattern of subinfeudation under substantial farmers known as haoladars to facilitate the work of reclamation. The demographic behaviour of west and east Bengal diverged sharply from the middle of the nineteenth century to about 1920. The final phase of demographic cycles in Bengal has been characterized by declining per capita output in a context of the generation of absolute surplus labour. Price movements of land and its products, as well as flows of credit for financing cultivation, interacted with the parameters set by demography.

This chapter focuses on the expanding market forces which, through dynamics of their own surely and steadily, engulfed rural Bengal and redirected the thrust of its people's productive activities. It also discusses the imperatives of states and political cultures which, behind the facade of a rhetoric of free trade from the early nineteenth century onwards, sought to impose and extend sets of monopolies. Ever since the 1820s colonial and post-colonial states as much as peasants and agricultural labourers have been susceptible to the rhythms and fluctuations of wider economic trends. Two types of agricultural commercialization have been most pervasive in moulding the productive activities of the working peasantry of eastern India. These were dependent commercialization of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, during which indigo was the leading commodity, and subsistence commercialization of the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, during which jute was the leading commodity.

This chapter tracks the continuities and illuminates the nature of qualitative change in agrarian structures by focusing upon 'the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the immediate producers'. Two key conditions of production in colonial India were, land and capital. The success of capitalist development in colonial eastern India rested primarily on the exploitation of peasant family labour. Evolving within the framework of larger economic arenas based on capitalism, the property-production interaction deeply influenced social relations of entitlement to land, work and subsistence in colonial and post-colonial India. The different configuration of agrarian social classes in the indigo-growing parts of Bengal and Bihar stemmed from important differences in the relationship between land and capital. The most dramatic changes occurred in the legal expressions of property, not at the level of the social organization of production and the poverty of peasants and labourers engaged in primary production.

The labour process in agrarian production marked by its familial character was encumbered by various forms of appropriation imposed upon it. 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 impact of the colonial land revenue demand on the well-being of India's peasantry has been a subject of political and scholarly disagreement ever since the later nineteenth century. The involvement of money lending landlords in the rice market blurred the distinction between trading and usury capital. Straddling the domain of the economic and the political, shifting relations of appropriation both sought to define and were acted upon by the mental world of the exploited. A mode of exploitation, even during an apparently unchallenged period of its domination, did not preside over a pulverized consciousness.

This chapter interprets the changing forms of agrarian resistance from the fakirs and farazis of the early colonial period to the naxalites of the post-colonial era with reference to both structures and mentalities. The Barasat revolt and the farazi movement are simply two of the more prominent examples of communitarian resistance in this period inspired by a religious ideology. In the latter half of nineteenth century, peasant resistance in the non-tribal areas forged class identities that emerged from newly reinforced individual rather than pre-existing communitarian rights. The emphasis in colonial tenancy law on individual rights of occupancy appeared to rob peasant resistance in Bengal of the overtly religious communitarian character it had displayed earlier in the nineteenth century. If the transformation of peasants into citizens entails instilling a national view of things in regional minds, this has been achieved by India's national project in the realm of rhetoric but not in reality.

This bibliography presents a list of reference articles that enable reader to understand peasant labour and colonial capital in rural Bengal in India since 1770. Scholars of colonial India have long been entranced by the intractable problem of 'land tenure', and enamoured of the age-old institution of 'village communities'. The relationship between population and production from the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century has been the subject of enquiry of both contemporary reports and articles and more recent scholarly publications. The level and burden of the colonial land revenue demand in the nineteenth century have now exercised and agitated four generations of scholars and polemicists. Peasant resistance in colonial India in general, and Bengal in particular, has been the theme on which there has been the most prolific historical writing in the past twenty-five years.