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 emphasizes that despite certain elements of continuity, the pre-British agrarian society and system was not quite the same as that which evolved during British rule. The continuity of the small peasant economy as the basic organization of agricultural production, and the continuities in terms of certain agrarian institutions, and of the numerical sizes of some economic groups, such as sharecroppers and agricultural labourers, concealed a significant process of change. Initially, throughout eastern India, the most decisive influence was the British policy of maximizing land revenue, which gradually lost its first potency, particularly in Bengal and Bihar, with the share of the state in the total agricultural produce eventually shrinking to insignificance. In other parts of eastern India, too, the old order could scarcely be wholly preserved, and the composition of the landed society considerably changed, mainly as a result of the growth of a land market, an altogether new development in the rural society.