000			nam a22 7a 4500
999			_c29408 _d29408
008			190511b xxu||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
020			_a9788178245447 _c(pbk)
082			_a338.10954 _bBHA
100			_aBhattacharya, Neeladri
245			_aGreat agrarian conquest : the colonial reshaping of a rural world
260			_aRanikhet : _bPermanent Black, _c2019
300			_axix, 522 p. : _bill. ; _c21.4 cm.
365			_aINR _b750.00
504			_aIncludes bibliographical references and index.
520			_aThis book examines how, over colonial times, the diverse practices and customs of an existing rural universe - with its many forms of lifelihood - 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. Colonialism, the book suggests, has the power to revisualise and reorder social relations and bonds of community. It changes the world radically, even when it seeks to preserve elements of the old. The changes it brings about are simultaneously cultural, discursive, legal, linguistic, spatial, social, and economic. Moving from intent to action, concepts to practices, legal enactments to court battles, official discourses to folklore, this book explores the conflicted and dialogic nature of a transformative process. By analysing this great conquest, and the often silent ways in which it unfolds, this book asks every historian to rethink the practice of writing agrarian history and reflect on the larger issues of doing history.
650			_aAgriculture
650			_aAgriculture and state
650			_aLand reform
650			_aColonization
942			_2ddc _cBK