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The Colonial State, Capital and the Peasantry in Bombay Presidency

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Vasant Kaiwar
Vasant Kaiwar
Affiliation:
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
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Abstract

Despite the commodification of land and labor in colonial Bombay Presidency, capitalism and its associated dynamic (modern economic growth via innovation, specialization, and so on resulting in the improved productiveness of labor) did not, by and large, develop.The colonial state reformed the property structure, bringing the notion of a single owner for each property, ending the overlapping property rights of the pre-colonial regimes. Capital was freely deployed to make profits of alienation, if not profits of enterprise. Yet, small-scale family-labor farms continued as the backbone of Bombay agriculture. The peasantry could not sustain capitalist-style growth but did maintain a tenacious hold on the land with the help of the state, and its own capacity to endure horrendous levels of exploitation and poverty; the former symptomized by high land prices and low crop prices paid to the producer; the latter by mass peasant insolvency. The power of capital was in direct proportion to the peasants' desperate need for land and loans. The colonial state was fully aware that this kind of relationship was inimical to development, but did little to bring capital into a productive relationship with landed property. The colonial state came to resemble a classic agrarian bureaucracy rather than a capitalist state. Despite some commitments to modernization, it ruled over an impoverished agrarian society. This paper attempts to locate this result in the specific interests and interactions of the major social agents of rural Bombay: the state, capital and the peasantry.

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Articles
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Modern Asian Studies , Volume 28 , Issue 4 , October 1994 , pp. 793 - 832
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

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4 This need may have been greater at certain times in the life-cycle of the peasant household and/or during droughts, famines, and similar events.

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6 Washbrook is implicity arguing that if the agrarian base (land) were fully subject to market interactions regulated by law then there would have been capitalist development instead of the peculiar impasse of colonial agriculture. For a different argument on landed property and capital, see the conclusion to this paper.

7 A system in which property ownership was in the hands of the immediate producers with the state collecting taxes (land revenue in the Indian jargon) from the peasant households. This is contrasted to the Zamindari system in which land was given to landlords with tenants cultivating the land. But, often, elaborate tenant protection made them into virtual property owners.

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22 Response of the Chairman, Royal Commission on Agriculture to a suggestion by N. R. Kembhavi, Managing Agent, Bijapur Mahalaxmi Company that the state use its muscle to expropriate the peasantry (RCA II: 2, pp. 471–2Google Scholar).

23 Mukhtyar, , Land and Labour in a South Gujarat Village, p. 270.Google Scholar This was true of other villages also: see Mann, H. H. and Kanitkar, N. V., Land and Labour in a Deccan Villages (No. 2) (London, 1921), henceforth Jategaon Budruk, p. 38;Google Scholar and Desai, M. B., Rural Economy of Gujarat, pp. 132–3.Google Scholar

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25 Through legislation like the Deccan Agriculturists Relief Act of 1879.

26 It is worth emphasizing that the problem of bringing development to agriculture was seen as a practical problem by governments in Europe and India in the nineteenth century. Colonial officials were well aware of the need to transform property relations to bring about this results. But their knowledge was, as this paper shows, academic. The problem, however, was not.

27 I am drawing liberally on Mazumdar, Sucheta, Peasants, Technology and the World Market: Sugar and Society in China, ch. 7 (forthcoming from Harvard University Press). I am grateful to Dr Mazumdar for permission to cite her work.Google Scholar See also, Wickberg, Edgar, ‘Continuities in Land Tenure, 1900–1940,’ in Ahern, E. M. and Gates, H. (eds.), The Anthropology of Taiwanese Society (Stanford, 1981);Google Scholar and Kerr, G. H., Formosa, Licensed Revolution and the Home Rule Movement 1895–1945 (Univ. of Hawaii Press, 1974).Google Scholar

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30 Mazumdar, , Peasants, Technology and the World Market, p. 453.Google Scholar On the spectacular growth of production and yields in Taiwan, see Kerr, , Formosa, p. 93Google ScholarAmsden, Alice (‘Taiwan's Economic History: A Case of Etatisme and a Challenge to Dependency Theory’, Modern China 5, 3 (07 1979), pp. 341–80) notes that this laid the foundation for Taiwan's subsequent economic development. Amsden, and others, are right, in my opinion, in stressing agricultural transformation as a necessary, if not sufficient, condition to bring about all-around modern economic growth.CrossRefGoogle Scholar This is also one of the crucial points of Brennner's, Robert ‘The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism’, Past and Present 97 (1982).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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32 This is where, I think, Brenner's concept of social-property relations is so important [‘Social Basis of Economic Development,’ in Roemer, John (ed), Analytical Marxism (Cambridge, 1986)]. Nominally, small-scale producers produced the crops in both countries. In one case, Taiwan, their nominal independence was seriously curtailed by the power of capital and the state in the service of capital. This is roughly what Marx meant by the ‘formal subsumption of labor to capital’ (Karl Marx, Capital, Vol I, the unedited chapter in the Vintage edition). In India, particularly in ryotwari areas like Western India, the autonomy of the peasantry (in matters relating to production and distribution) was apparently much greater. Jairus Banaji and others have exaggerated the extent of the subsumption of peasants to capital. Even where usury and rent-squeezing existed, they represented profits of alienation, rather than the reduction of the labor of the immediate producer to an aspect of the circulation of capital. For more on this, see Kaiwar, ‘Social- Property Relations and the Economic Dynamic, ’ ch. I.Google Scholar

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36 It was not a coincidence that the revenue department (geared to extracting land-tax) was the key department in colonial administrations throughout British India.

37 Bombay bureaucrats, and generally colonial officials, tended to work with the notion of organic village communities, internally divided by caste, but nonetheless quite cohesive. In this framework, there were insiders and outsiders (the latter, particularly‘professional’ moneylenders constituting a threat to the cohesion of the village community). As this paper shows, the very actions of the state made the village ‘community’ anything but ‘organic.’

38 Kumar, Ravinder, Western India in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1968), p. 252. Land revenue assessments were fixed for long periods—30 years in the nineteenth century, later reduced to 20 years. When the period was up, the Revenue Department would reassess the land tax based on changes in price and output levels since the previous settlement.Google Scholar

39 Deccan Riots Commission [henceforth DRC] I, p. 31.Google Scholar

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44 DRC, Appendix B, William Wedderburn, Report on the Indebtedness of the Ryot, 7th December 1876, para 5.Google Scholar

45 In the districts of Thana and Kolaba, for instance, merchant capitalists owned between 45 and 55 per cent of the land. Yet, these districts not only did not undergo development, but endured some of the most draconian forms of rent-squeezing and similar types of exploitation (Gazetteers of the Bombay Presidency, [henceforth GBP], Thana (vol. 13, 1882) and Kolaba and Janjira (vol. 11, 1883).

46 This point has been made by Brenner, ‘The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism’ in discussing French agriculture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

47 Sir Denzil Ibbetson to Lord Curzon, 6th August 1905, quoted in Bhutani, V. C., ‘Agricultural Indebtedness and the Alienation of Land, ’ Journal of Indian History 47, I (04 1969), p. 279.Google Scholar

48 Basically, officials who wanted to provide a legal solution for social problems.

49 T. C. Hope, Speech to the Governor General's council on the Deccan Agricultural Bill, BGR (New Series) no 157, portions reproduced in Ray, S. C., Agricultural Indebtedness in India and its Remedies, being Selections from Official Documents (Calcutta, 1915).Google Scholar

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52 Of course this brought a poor peasant only a small measure of relief. He could still lose his land if he failed to make his instalment payments.

53 India Office Library, [IOL] Govt. of India, Land Revenue Proceedings (October 1905, no. 37), W. T. Morrison, Secr. to Bombay Government to Secr., Government of India, no. 719, 2 February 1903, quoted in Charlesworth, Peasants and Imperial Rule, p. 244.Google Scholar

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56 For the stratum of rich peasants, the advantages of access to large amounts of capital were that they could grow cash crops for the market, lend money, and enter into local trading networks, in short a diversified strategy of reproduction. For urban-based capitalists loans were a way to ‘pay’ in advance for crops. Also, given the necessity for deploying some of their capital in the countryside, they could, by directing their capital through the leaders of the villages, forego the costs of supervision and collection. They had really no other viable option.

57 Hope, T. C., Speech to the Governor General's council on the Deccan Agricultural Bill, BGR (New Series) No. 157, in Ray, Agricultural Indebtedness in India.Google Scholar

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61 Bhaduri, Amit, ‘Evolution of Land Relations in Eastern India Under British Rule’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 13, 1 (1976), p. 48. The argument was applied particularly to Bengal in Eastern India, but the mechanism would presumably operate elsewhere.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

62 I am assuming that landlords with extra-economic coercive powers will feel no systemic pressure to innovate, cut unit cost of production, and so on. In this, of course, I am following the argument laid down by Brenner (article cited above).

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64 ibid. This depopulation of estates must have intensified population pressures on surrounding ryotwari areas.

65 The bhagdari and narvadari were variants of zamindari type settlements (Bombay Provincial Banking Enquiry Committee, Report 1929–30 [henceforth, BPBEC], I, pp. 25–6;Google Scholar Revenue Survey Settlement, Jalalpur talukka, p. 11; Desai, , Rural Economy of Gujarat, p. 103).Google Scholar

66 Inam means ‘gift’ or ‘grant’ (of piece of land) and was generally conferred in pre-colonial days in return for services rendered to the state. Under the colonial settlements, inam lands were paid a very small amount of land revenue, that was not subject to upward revisions (BPBEC, I, p. 24;Google ScholarDesai, , Rural Economy of Gujarat, p. 107).Google Scholar

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69 ibid.

70 See mainly Breman, Jan, Patronage and Exploitation: Changing Agrarian Relations in South Gujarat, India (Berkeley, 1974);Google ScholarJoshi, V. H., Economic Development and Social Change in a South Gujarat Village (Baroda, 1966);Google ScholarBates, Crispin, ‘The Nature of Social Change in Rural Gujarat: The Kheda district, 1818–1918,’ Modern Asian Studies 15, 4 (1981), p. 796.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

71 More on this below. Breman stresses the economic basis on which landlords chose not to continue the hali system. As they switched to mango-cultivation many of the Brahmin patrons chose to dissolve their ties with their halis. The mere fact that former landlords had to make such economic calculations suggests that the extra-economic basis of their social power was being dissolved.

72 IOL Bombay Land Revenue Proceedings, vol. 11540 July 1926, p. 405 quoted in Charlesworth, Peasants and Imperial Rule, p. 189.Google Scholar

73 GBP, Ratnagiri and Savantvadi, p. 138.Google Scholar

74 See Kumar, , Western India, pp. 84–128, for an extended discussion of this process in the districts around Poona in the period after 1818.Google Scholar

75 Bates, , ‘The Nature of Social Change in Gujarat,’ p. 777.Google Scholar

76 GBP Ahmedabad, p. 158.Google Scholar

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78 Ibid., pp. 806–7.

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81 Ibid., p. 804.

82 Hardiman, , Peasant Nationalists, pp. 32–3.Google Scholar

83 Recall that there were two big bouts of mortality in Western India, one in 1899–1900 with the famine, and another in 1918 with the influenza epidemic. In between these two episodes, given the high fertility fate, we have to assume that population was growing around 1–1.5 per cent per annum or so.

84 Hardiman, , Peasant Nationalists, p. 181.Google Scholar

85 Thus, when there was a mass rebellion by the Baraiya peasants in Kaira against the new landowners in 1916–17, the government used force to crush the rebellion (ibid., p. 18).

86 The two are structually related, especially where the family labor farm is the unit of production.

87 Most tenancies in Bombay were annual or very short-term “BPBEC I: p. 27”.Google Scholar

88 Kooiman, Dick, ‘Rural Labour in the Bombay Textile Industry and the Articulation of Modes of Organization,’ in Robb, Peter (ed.), Rural South Asia (London, 1983), p. 137.Google Scholar

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90 Report of the Famine Commission, 1880, Pt. II, p. 125.Google Scholar

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93 Ibid., p. 186.

94 Mukhtyar, , Life and Labour in a South Gujarat Taluka, p. 201.Google Scholar

95 Ibid., p. 202.

96 Keatinge, , Agricultural Progress in Western India, p. 45.Google Scholar

97 Mishra, S. C., ‘Commercialization, Peasant Differentiation, and Merchant Capital in Late Nineteenth Century Bombay and Punjab’, Journal of Peasant Studies 10, 1 (1983), Tables 3, p. 18;Google ScholarKeatinge, , Agricultural Progress in Western India, pp. 48–9.Google Scholar

98 Guha, Sumit, Agrarian Economy of the Bombay Deccan, 1818–1914 (Delhi, 1985), pp. 105–6. I have shown elsewhere that, initially yields in Khandesh were very low, and the rise only brought it in line with the yields elsewhere in Western India, which by the global standards of the time were rather poor anyway (Kaiwar, ‘Social-Property Relations and the Economic Dynamic’, ch. 6).Google Scholar

99 I have not even taken into consideration the rise in the price of foodstuffs that a cotton-producing family might purchase.

100 As, for example, Mukhytar was, when he made an evaluation of what each category was worth. The difference between what the land was worth and what the peasantry was willing to pay constitutes in itself one way in which the peasantry could be exploited. More on this below.

101 Michie, Barry H., ‘Baniyas in the Indian Agrarian Economy: A Case of Stagnant Entrepreneurship,’ Journal of Asian Studies 37, 4, (1978), p. 649;CrossRefGoogle Scholar see also in this context, Banaji, Jairus, ‘Chayanov, Kautsky, and Lenin,’ Economic and Political Weekly 12 (2 10. 1976), p. 35;Google ScholarChyanov, A. V., ‘On the Theory of the Non-capitalist Economic Systems,’ in Thorner, Daniel et al. (eds.) A. V. Chayanov on the Theory of the Peasant Economy (Homewood, IL, 1966), pp. 1–28.Google Scholar

102 Byln, George, Agricultural Trends in India 1891–1947: Output, Availability and Productivity (Philadelphia, 1966), p. 100;CrossRefGoogle ScholarMishra, S. C., ‘On the Reliability of pre–Independence Statistics in Bombay and Punjab’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 20, 2 (1983), p. 173.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

103 Parliamentary Papers, vol. 52 of 1880, Report of the Indian Famine Commission, pt. 2 ch. 3, section 2, para. 7; Charlesworth, , Peasants and Imperial Rule, p. 168.Google Scholar

104 BPBEC II, p. 397, written evidence of G. K. Chitale. There is a strong implication in Harold Mann's evidence to the Royal Commission on Agriculture, though not necessarily in his other writings, that part of the obstacle to agricultural development was an irrationality in the peasant outlook, whereby a “man would rather get Rs 10 a month by cultivating his own plot, than Rs 15 a month and work for someone else” [Mann to RCA II: I, oral evidence Q. 2941].Google Scholar

105 In the second half of the nineteenth century, many families moved to Khandesh. And whenever land became available after about of high mortality, peasants were prepared to travel distances to take up cultivation.

106 To confuse the issue somewhat, peasant landowners were referred to as ‘occupancy tenants’. The occupancy tenant was one who paid the government land revenue and had all legal ownership rights [BPBEC I, pp. 25–6”. The reason for referring to them as occupancy tenants came out of the legal fiction that the state owned all the land in ryotwari areas and leased the land to tenants. In fact, the government could do little, as we noted, about the way land was subdivded, mortgaged, sold, bought, etc. A private market in land was a reality of colonial India. As land became a more valuable commodity with population growth, and without substantial economic diversification, passing on land to one's heirs was a sound strategy, both as inter–generational transfer of a basic subsistence resource and as old–age insurance.

107 Charlesworth, , Peasants and Imperial Rule, p. 175.Google Scholar

108 RCA Report, p. 131.Google Scholar

109 This is the sort of phenomeon Jacques Chavalier refers to as ‘exchange of use values among simple commodity producers.’ [Chevalier, Jacques, ‘There is Nothing Simple about Simple Commodity Producers,’ Journal of Peasant Studies 10, 4 (07 1983), p. 179].CrossRefGoogle Scholar

110 Desai, , Rural Economy of Gujarat, p. 119.Google Scholar

111 Ibid.

112 Indian Central Cotton Committee [henceforth ICCC], Report of an Investigation into the Finance and Marketing of Cultivators’ Cotton in North Gujarat 1925–28, p. 3.Google Scholar

113 Desai, , Rural Economy of Gujarat, pp. 130–1.Google Scholar

114 Guha, , Agrarian Economy of the Bombay Deccan, pp. 149–58;Google ScholarGuha, Sumit, ‘Some Aspects of the Rural Economy of the Bombay Deccan,’ in Raj, K. N. et al. (eds), Essays in the Commercialization of Agriculture (New Delhi, 1985), pp. 232–5. Guha's view of technology as a deus ex machina strikes me as pure techno–fetishism.Google Scholar

115 Charlesworth, , ‘Rich Peasants and Poor Peasants,’ in Dewey, C. and Hopkins, A. G. (eds), The Imperial Impact: Studies in the Economic History of India and Africa (London, 1978).Google Scholar

116 Guha, , ‘Some Aspects of the Rural Economy of the Bombay Deccan,’ pp. 232–3, 235; Agrarian Economy of the Bombay Deccan, pp. 152–3.Google Scholar

117 Guha, , Agrarian Economy of the Bombay Deccan, Table 13, p. 236.Google Scholar

118 Pandit, Dhairyabala, ‘The Myths Surrounding Subdivision and Fragmentation of Holdings: A Few Case Histories’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 6, 2 (06 1969), has suggested that many peasants in Western India came to regard land purely as an ornament, that their real sources of wealth lay elsewhere. I do not support the Pandit thesis, because while ‘rich peasants’ did accumulate other forms of wealth, no one in rural Western India could regard land purely as an ornament. However, I maintain that owning land became part of a diversifed strategy of rich peasant reproduction.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

119 Mishra, , ‘Commercialization, Peasant Differentiation, and Merchant Capital’ pp. 35ff; ‘Patterns of Long–Run Agrarian Change’, pp. 17–18; 125.Google Scholar

120 See, e.g., Vicziany, Marika, ‘Bombay Merchants and Structural Changes in the Export Community 1850–1880,’ in Chaudhuri, K. N. and Dewey, Clive (eds), Economy and Society: Essays in Indian Economic and Social Hiostory (New Delhi, 1979).Google Scholar

121 Kumar, , Western India, pp. 1–40, 137–58;Google ScholarCharlesworth, , Peasants and Imperial Rule, p. 5;Google ScholarBanaji, , ‘Capitalist Domination and the Small Peasantry’.Google Scholar

122 Excerpts from a Report by Sinclair, Asst. Collector of Ahmednagar, in DRC I, p. 24.Google Scholar

123 See DRC Appendix C, pp. 37–8; 208–9 on why this was so.

124 This is the reading that Banaji places on the activities of the richer peasants, who were said to have had a ‘taste for getting land into their own hands,’ investing subsequently in improved implements, better-quality cattle, etc. [Banaji, ‘Capitalist Domination and the Small Peasantry,’ pp. 394ff]. It is doubful that the reproduction of the rich peasantry in the 1860s and 1870s– and by implication later as well– was ever as exclusively tied to productive uses of accumulated money–capital as Banaji argued. This is simply a repetition of the bureaucratic mind–set that classified moneylenders as parasitic and peasants as productive.Google Scholar

125 DRC App. C, pp. 84–5.Google Scholar

126 Banaji, , ‘Capitalist Domination and the Small Peasantry,’ pp. 391–2.Google Scholar

127 Papers Relating to DARA, vol. 1, p. 401.Google Scholar

128 Kumar, , Western India, pp. 218–21.Google Scholar

129 There is a third aspect of this process of restructuring, that relates to the utilization of savings by rich peasants to enter trade, and via producer co-operatives in sugar, for instance, to enter the world of manufacturing by processing sugar, and in the cotton industry by the ownership of ginning and pressing factories. This movement was still in its infancy in the late colonial period, so I will not deal with it here, but it is certainly crucial for a study of post–1947 economic trends.Google Scholar

130 Bombay Presidency Registration Department Report 1895–1896, p. 49.Google Scholar

131 Shukla, , Life and Labour in a South Gujarat Taluka, p. 241.Google Scholar

132 Ibid., p. 239.

133 Annual Report on the Workings of Co-operative Societies in the Province of Bombay, 1939–40, p. 35;Google ScholarDesai, , Rural Economy of Gujarat, pp. 180–8, 192;Google ScholarBPBEC I, 426;Google ScholarBPBEC III, pp. 205, 309;Google ScholarDesai, G. H., written evidence to RCA II, p. 160.Google Scholar

134 BPBEC II, p. 89;Google ScholarDesai, , Rural Economy of Gujarat, p. 188.Google Scholar

135 Patel, , Indian Agricultural Economics, p. 263;Google ScholarDesai, , Rural Economy of Gujarat, p. 188.Google Scholar

136 Desai, , Rural Economy of Gujarat, p. 189,Google Scholar referring to the evidence of Desai, G. H. to RCA II: 2, p. 204.Google Scholar G. H. Desai was of the opinion that where the well–off farmers were well entrenched they could be an obstacle to the emergence of co–operatives. He misunderstood the economic dynamic altogether. Co–operative funding was just another way to accumlate money for ‘profit by squeeze’. In areas that were economically a little better off then others, perhaps there was no pressing need to garner funds in this way, so the rich peasants who were everywhere beneficiaries of co–operatives were simply not interested.

137 This is an excellent insight, but Charlesworth (Peasants and Imperial Rule, p. 193) was unable to develop its full analytical potential because he was fixated on the realm of the accumulation of material wealth like carts, implements, and cattle and tended to see these as the main criteria of wealth and differentiation.Google Scholar

138 BGR (New Series) no. 337, Settlement Report of the Borsad Taluka, January 19, 1895, Report by E. Maconochie, p. 6.Google Scholar

139 DRC vol. I, p. 83;Google Scholar MARD vol. 74 of 1905, no. 428, pt. 2: Lallubhai Samaldas to Sir James Monteath (July 30, 1904); Shukla, Life and Labour in a South Gujarat Taluka, pp. 193–5.Google Scholar

140 Shukla shows that in every one of the fertile eastern villages in the taluka there were elite landowners, with large amounts of money on loan from moneylenders [Shukla, Life and Labour in a South Gujarat Taluka, pp. 213–14; 226–7].Google Scholar

141 Shukla's discussion on agriculture shows that wealthier cultivators possessed, at most, slightly better quality cattle. Their implements appeared to be of the ordinary kind made in the village itself [ibid., pp. 137–64].

142 ICCC Report on the Finance and Marketing of Cultivators’ Cotton, Table VIII, p. 28;Google ScholarFforde, A. B., Report on the Grain Trade of the Deccan, MARD vol. 29 of 1883, para 8.Google Scholar

143 Mukhtyar, , Life and Labour in a South Gujarat Village, pp. 250–2.Google Scholar

144 Jategaon Budruk, pp. 118–19.Google Scholar

145 Mann is unfortunately not explicit on this, but locational and other factors would play an important role on how wide the connections of the village with the ‘outside’ world would be.

146 Pimpla Soudagar, pp. 130–1.Google Scholar

147 Ibid., p. 132.

148 Desai, , Rural Economy of Gujarat, p. 256.Google Scholar

149 Peasants needed cash to pay land revenue, interest charges, and buy consumption items not produced by the domestic economy.

150 It should be noted that wheat was not part of the peasant diet in Bombay, but was grown for the market. Report on the Marketing of Wheat in India (1937), p. 18.Google Scholar

151 Keatinge, , Rural Economy in the Bombay Deccan, p. 159.Google Scholar

152 Ibid., pp. 159–60.

153 Ibid., p. 160.

154 Often the same group of people.

155 Dantwala, M. L., Hundred Years of Indian Cotton (Bombay, 1948), pp. 59–60.Google Scholar

156 BPBEC I, pp. 99–100.Google Scholar

157 Dantwala, M. L., Marketing of Raw Cotton in India (Bombay, 1937), pp. 36, 61–2.Google Scholar

158 Burt, B. C., written evidence to RCA II:2 p. 16.Google Scholar

159 Ibid., Wagholkar, B. P., ‘Co-operative Cotton Sales’, in Kaji, H. L. (ed.), Co-operation in Bombay: Short Studies (Bombay, 1930), pp. 105, 107.Google Scholar

160 I.e. that the cotton produced for weighing was inferior to that presented for inspection. In the absence of any system of grading, it was the growers who paid the penalty for this kind of out-bargaining.

161 BPBEC I, p. 103.Google Scholar

162 Mann, written evidence to RCA II: 1, p. 12;Google ScholarBurt, B. C. to RCA II: 2, p. 15;Google ScholarDantwala, , Marketing of Raw Cotton in India, p. 58.Google Scholar

163 Mann, , written evidence to RCA II: 1, pp. 12–13.Google Scholar

164 Chevalier reminds us that merchants do not always engage in operations pertaining to circulation alone, much less the kind of exploitative behavior referred to above. Their productive interventions can take the form of investments in storage, transport, expediting the circulation process, and so on. Marx referred to the ‘bringing of the product to the market’ as part of the ‘productive process itself,’ and reducing the costs of circulation as belonging to the ‘sphere of the development of the productive forces’ [cited Chevalier, ‘There is Nothing Simple about Simple Commodity Production,’ p, 182, n. 11] Clearly, merchants in Bombay did not make even these modest contributions to developing the productive powers of labor.

165 Levine, David, Reproducing Families: The Political Economy of English Population History (Cambridge, 1987);Google ScholarLevine, David, ‘Proto–Industrialization and Demographic Upheaval’, in Moch, L. P. and Stark, G. D. (eds), Essays on the Family and Historical Change (College Station, 1983);Google ScholarSeccombe, Wally, ‘Marxism and Demography’, New Left Review, no. 137 (1983). See also my ‘Property Structures, Demographyand the Crisis of the Agrarian Economy of Colonial Bombay Presidency.’Google Scholar

166 Bombay Presidency Land Revenue Administration Report, 1911–1912, part 2, page 48; BPBEC I, p. 51.Google Scholar