Different legal legacies

The author is a well-known historian. She belongs to the intellectual tradition broadly labelled as liberal Marxism or soft Left. This tradition prefers to analyse the past in terms of groups such as labour or peasants, as the case may be, instead of owners of capital or land.

The attempt is to go beyond the normal analytical categories of economics such as incentives and disincentives and how they influence output. It seeks to see what might be driving those incentives and disincentives. Accordingly, she challenges a long-held orthodoxy: namely, that the Raj was hugely beneficial to Punjab's farmers. The truth, she says, is different. Punjabi farmers were as badly mauled as farmers elsewhere in India. The British depended heavily on Punjab for soldiers, so they cultivated the myth of a prosperous peasantry.

Mukherjee has examined the evidence available in land records and other contemporary reports of the Punjab government. The bibliography is delightful, as are the footnotes.

It turns out that even though there may have been superficial differences between what happened, on the one hand, in Bengal and Bihar""the two places where colonialism did its very worst""and Punjab, on the other, Punjab did not actually fare much better. For example, driven as they were by the need to grab as much of the surplus produced by farmers in both regions, the British devised structures of extraction that led to the same results by way of distribution of asset holdings and wages. The poor became poorer, and extractors became richer.

But, she says, there was an important difference. The Permanent Settlement of 1793 in Bengal froze the portion that the British could extract; in Punjab this did not happen. There the demands could be, and were often, increased. This had many consequences, including "the growth of intermediary right holders (in Bengal) who shared out the increasing difference between the value of the revenue and the rent demand. In Punjab the possibility of the state mopping up any such increases acted as a brake on the growth of intermediary rights."

This, she says, is why intermediary rent-collecting and sub-tenurial rights did not emerge anywhere outside Bengal. But that does not automatically mean that the farmers were better off. They suffered the same highly predatory state.

The most important aspect of capitalist farming, however, is investment and capital accumulation. Mukherjee has devoted an entire chapter to it. It makes for very interesting reading, not least because she arrives, albeit by her very different route, at the very conclusion that capitalism insists upon""strong property rights.

Neither investment nor capital accumulation occurred in the measure that one could reasonably expect from a capitalist production mode. The reason for this, says Mukherjee, was inadequate and impermanent tenancy rights. She does not, however, explain why the British didn't create such rights in Punjab while doing so in Bengal .

The rights were of such short duration that it simply wasn't worthwhile for cultivators to invest in improvements. This, in turn, meant lower levels of accumulation. In terms of modern economic parlance, institutional factors played a key role.

This book should be read by all reformer economists, even if it is not written by an economist. It provides insights that only historical records, not endless regressions, can provide. The editing could, however, have rid the text of its tedious jargon, or at least have explained it better.

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COLONIALIZING AGRICULTURE
THE MYTH OF PUNJAB EXCEPTIONALISM

Mridula Mukherjee
Sage
Price: Rs 420; Pages: 209