The Permanent Settlement In Bengal

The last quarter of the eighteenth century was marked by the gradual extension of effective British control over major parts of the Indian subcontinent, notably its eastern regions. The hallmark of this control, besides the growth of administrative structures and in a sense a trigger to it, was the growing demand of the English East India Company for revenue to meet the costs of its `investment’ in Indian goods, and thereby end the outflow of bullion from Britain. In the specific case of Eastern India, this drive towards revenue maximization was complicated by a severe economic crisis. This was marked by the Bengal famine of 1769-70, which, according to reliable estimates, decimated almost a third of Bengal’s population. The dominant modes of resource extraction were subjected to examination and debate from the 1770s on, and this eventually, after over two decades of experiment, produced the Permanent Settlement in land revenue administration, promulgated by Cornwallis in early 1793.

Battle of Buxar (1764):

After the Battle of Buxar in 1765, the Treaty of Allahabad established a system of `dual government’ for Bengal subah ( which also included Bihar and Orissa ), whereby justice and civil administration were formally in the hands of the naib diwan for the province, while the English East India Company commanded its revenues. These helped make up the significant imbalance in the Company’s India trade, the costs it incurred in maintaining troops and in its aid to the Madras Presidency. As Peter Marshall points out, to begin with Clive and his successors had assumed that the acquisition of territory need not compel the Company to make the shift from merchant to full-scale administrator. They had also assumed that the revenue arrangement they had devised ( a system of tax-farming whereby revenue-collecting rights were auctioned annually to ijaradars or `farmers’ ) would yield requisite returns. They were mistaken in both these assumptions, as the needs of the Company intensified and the apparent venality of Indian officials ( who largely controlled the actual execution of revenue policy ) came to occupy centrestage in British administrative discourse, partly as a result of the Bengal Famine. It was seen as necessary to concentrate all effective power with the Company, and in 1772 Warren Hastings was ordered to `stand forth’ as the Diwan for Bengal subah. The collection of revenue and judicial functions were thus unified under a single head, and Muhammad Reza Khan, the naib diwan of Bengal, was dismissed.

Debate over revenue policy-1772—1793:

Between 1772 and the promulgation of Permanent Settlement in 1793, the British government, colonial officials and administrators, and some of the major economic thinkers and policy-makers of the time engaged in sharp debates over the nature of a viable revenue arrangement that might approach permanence and stability, while guaranteeing that the needs of expansion, administration and exploitation were met. There were three determining assumptions behind these debates. First, as Harry Verelst ( Governor of Bengal ) noted, the economy of Bengal was undergoing a marked decline in every sector: revenues, private and public commerce, manufactures and agriculture. Second, Indian officials were suspect and corrupt, and needed to be replaced by Europeans. Third, a stable revenue arrangement could only be possible with guaranteed conditions of continuity and security of tenure – revenue-collectors shouldn’t just be transitory plunderers concerned solely with quick profits before the annual auction ( as the ijaradars were ).

The Company managed to Europeanize the apex of the administrative hierarchy to a degree. Individual Europeans were appointed to some of the important units of revenue administration with the title of Supervisor ( known as Collectors from 1772 ). Controlling Councils of Revenue were set up at Murshidabad and Patna. However, in everyday practice most of the districts continued to be managed by Indian officials: mutaseddis, diwans and sheristadars, and Europeanization did not filter down beyond the apex.

The debate on the creation of long-term interests in revenue collection turned on the recognition of the failure of the annual-auction ijara system. The ijaradars frequently bid well beyond their capacity to pay, and annual renewals/transfers of rights cancelled out the possibilities of long-term interests in improving the yield of land. In 1772, Hastings modified the system by giving farmers tenure for five years. However, this Quinquennial Settlement was soon widely seen to have failed, as farmers couldn’t pay the amount they’d contracted for, and battened heavily on cultivators.

By the mid-1770s, the specific needs of the Company in the field of revenue administration had crystallized into a clear shape. In the context of the economic crisis faced by Bengal, a stable arrangement that would guarantee a regular yield of income and also invest those who collected this yield with certain permanent rights was seen as necessary. The locus of these rights was the creation ( or recognition ) of property in land – of a class of legitimate landholders with the right to alienate, mortgage or lease out their lands. In effect, this would resolve the historic complexity and multiplicity of land rights – an enduring theme in Indian agrarian history – into a single right: that of unqualified ownership. This, it was widely believed, would set the `productive principle’ in motion, especially if the demand for revenue on the part of the Company remained stable and static. The zamindar stood to make substantial profits if he extended cultivation, as a stable revenue demand would imply an increasing gap between revenue and rent.

The desire to create property in land was accompanied, as Ranajit Guha points out, by an expectation that the Indian zamindar, invested with a permanent interest in land and energized by the anticipation of profit, would come to acquire the attributes of the English gentleman-farmer. In its most coherent form, this expectation can be identified as a desire to introduce capitalist agriculture into the Indian economy. The mechanism for this would naturally be the permanence of tenure and revenue demand. However, parallel to this ran a desire to weed out inefficient managers of land: thus, strict punishment ( the sale of property ) upon failure to pay the stipulated land revenue was seen as desirable. Further, the land sales provoked by default upon payment would produce a buoyant market in land, investment in which would ( hoped the British ) be facilitated by the anticipation of profit.

There was another impulse that went into the making of what would become the Permanent Settlement – that of political accomodation. The British were aware that the tax-farming system, founded on impermanence, had caused much dislocation and insecurity among the rural aristocracy. A more stable arrangement – further, one that would eventually be extremely beneficial to the landholding elites ( at the expense of the peasant cultivator ), would create a valuable ally for the colonial state, in the form of the zamindar. In this expectation the British were to be proved accurate: subsequent to the Permanent Settlement, the rural elites came to constitute one of the most loyal bulwarks of colonial rule.

This account of the impulses behind the Permanent Settlement would give the impression that British revenue policy in India was formed essentially as a series of – more or less – logical responses to a situation, the empirical testing of a particular arrangement being the guiding factor behind its employment or modification/rejection. Such a view is not inaccurate – in large measure colonial policy did follow empirical, trial-and-error patterns. However, such a view is also insufficient. Neeladri Bhattacharya points out an important shift in historiographical assumptions about British agrarian policy that emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s, represented by the work of Ranajit Guha on the Permanent Settlement and Eric Stokes on Northern India. In their work, the assumption that revenue policy was based entirely on empirical trial-and-error is replaced by an attempt to relate it to the intellectual milieu of late-18th and early-19th century Europe ( a common thread being the Enlightenment belief in universal laws that cut across space and time ). Ranajit Guha has anatomized the ways in which revenue policy in eastern India was anchored in a certain moment in the evolution of European philosophy and – more specifically – economic ideology. Guha locates the idea of Permanent Settlement on the axis of the ideological shift from mercantilism to Free Trade, mediated by Physiocratic doctrine. This shift found expression in the ways in which the ideas that animated – or sought to animate – revenue administration changed. The key figures in this debate for Guha are Alexander Dow, a mercantilist ( who saw agricultural improvement primarily as an auxiliary of commerce ), Henry Patullo and Philip Francis, physiocrats ( who located the source of general economic development in agriculture, as the source of wealth ), and Thomas Law and Cornwallis, laissez-faire ideologues. In Guha’s study, it is Francis who emerges as the chief architect in the formulation of the idea of Permanent Settlement – in his Plan of 1776, which anticipated most of the substance of the 1793 arrangement – although it was Thomas Law who purged Francis’ doctrine of `feudal alloy’ and elaborated it in the form in which it was to emerge. Francis’ doctrine, while the base for the final Settlement, occupied an ambiguous and uneasy position with reference to it, since it was also structured as a critique of the drain of resources from India by the Company. Thus, he suggested, contrary to all his contemporaries, that the Company extract only as much revenue as it needed to meet the costs of its `investment’, expansion and administration. The motive of Permanent Settlement, on Francis’ terms, was to rationalize exploitation, not maximize it.

Promulgation of the Permanent Settlement in 1793.

The Permanent Settlement was formally enacted in 1793. The revenue-farming system was replaced by an arrangement in which those described as zamindars in the revenue records were recognized as such. Thus, the basis of the Permanent Settlement was the identification of land as private property. In keeping with Francis’ ideas ( though contravening those of John Shore ), landed property was recognized as hereditary. It was to be transferable by sale, bequest, mortgage or gift. The State’s demand was fixed ( first for ten years, but shortly after perennially ) at 10/11th of the total rental income. The sum payable was fixed on the basis of the yield for 1789-90, at Rs. 26,800,989. This initial amount was fixed at such a high level because the State repudiated any claim to an increase in the yield generated by enhanced productivity. This incentive to extend cultivation, it was hoped, would stabilize agricultural productivity. However, these regulations, extremely favourable to the proprietor of land, were balanced by the Sunset Law. If by sundown on the day he was supposed to pay the assessed revenue the zamindar failed to do so, he would have to part with his zamindari or part of it ( depending on the magnitude of his default ). The land surrendered would either be resumed by the State or auctioned.

The Permanent Settlement did not directly address the question of agrarian relations, or relations between landlord and cultivating ryot. In large measure, this was because the British felt that they were not competent to intervene radically in the complexities of rural social structure, and that relationships turning on land control were best left to `natural’ laws. The laws of supply and demand were to provide the regulating mechanism. The British were aware of the oppression of tenants, but also aware that legislation on their behalf would be seen as detrimental to the revenue-paying capacity of landlords, and would alienate them. Further, in the context of the immense labour scarcity ( relative to land ) caused by the famine of 1770, the British had reason to believe that the landlord’s demand for labour would be sufficiently intense to prevent him from battening excessively on the tenants. This was clearly over-optimistic, as the rapid rise in population from the end of the eighteenth century was to demonstrate. However, Cornwallis did rule that the terms of tenure and amount of rent payable were to be registered in documents called pattas, which would regulate the contract between landlord and tenant. Disputes were to be settled in district courts. Further, in place of the multiple burdens that could be placed on the cultivator, there was formally only one, unified revenue demand, further cesses and exactions being forbidden.

Another matter initially unresolved was the definition of `permanent’ in the Permanent Settlement. Initially, contrary to Francis’ arguments, the revenue was fixed for a ten-year period. The leading advocate of this qualification, Sir John Shore, argued that this trial period was necessary for possible correctives. The counter-argument, articulated by Cornwallis, was that anything short of complete permanence would be self-defeating, since it would undermine the confidence of zamindars in the system. This view prevailed eventually, and in March 1793, the Settlement was declared permanent.

Not unnaturally, the Permanent Settlement was to have major and lasting consequences in Indian history, well beyond the anticipations, hopes and fears of its creators. First of all, as expected, the long process of experiment and trial-and-error in colonial agrarian policy came to an end. The administrative difficulties of land revenue management were to a large degree simplified by the blueprint laid out by the Permanent Settlement, which marked the responsibilities of the colonial state off from the vast grey zone of rural social relations, where the `natural laws’ of supply and demand and the historical customs of the village community were the dominant agents in the determination of hierarchies and rights. In practice, however, this division was frequently to break down, as the Permanent Settlement set off momentous social changes that could not simply be ignored by colonial legislation.

Subsequent to the Permanent Settlement, rural eastern India did see a substantial extension of cultivation. This, however, probably owed less to the Settlement than to the rapid increase in population. Further, this was not accompanied by major technological breakthroughs or a substantial rise in agricultural productivity. Thus, the `improving landlord’ who was such a central part of the mystique of private property in land in the colonial imagination failed to materialize.

Comparisons of paper assessments ( gross jama ) before and after the Permanent Settlement indicate that the new assessment was roughly 18.5% higher ( in Bengal ) than the last one. In the initial stages, however, the actual collection of revenue was very different from the amount assessed, something the British officials were probably resigned to, given the magnitude of the demand. Till about 1797-98, about 10% of the assessed revenue had to be written off because of the failure of zamindars to pay. It was only in the early years of the nineteenth century that the demand fixed began to be realized in full, and by that time the dislocation and volatility caused by the new arrangement was already immense.

Another context of and reason for this volatility was the situation of agricultural prices in Bengal. After a prolonged upward movement between the 1740s and 1770s, prices stabilized and even began to drift lower. The Permanent Settlement occurred in a context of stagnant prices, which made its effects very burdensome. The burdens were accentuated in Orissa – where the Settlement was not finalized till 1847 – by a deteriorating exchange rate for the cowries in which most peasants paid their rent. Thus, although the effect of the revenue demand fixed by the Permanent Settlement was probably not as crippling as the assessments indicate, and while experiences must have varied according to situation, immense hardships certainly did result from the policy.

The social consequences of the Permanent Settlement were probably most marked in the case of the fate of the landholding classes in Eastern India. The Sunset Law was strictly implemented, and many great landholding families lost their privileges and influence completely. In 1790, twelve families handled over half the revenue assessment of Bengal. Soon after the Permanent Settlement was promulgated, the Burdwan Raj was the only one of these holdings that had not given way. The obverse of this, naturally, was an unprecedented volume of land sales. According to B. Chaudhuri, land on which about 41% of Bengal’s assessed revenue depended was put up for sale between 1794 and 1807 at very low prices. Until 1806-07, when land prices rose markedly and the volume of sales declined, there was immense dislocation and instability among the landholding classes of eastern India. 

The traditional assumption about the social identity of the new zamindars, originating in the immediate aftermath of the Permanent Settlement and eventually occupying a key position in nationalist interpretations of colonial policy and its consequences, was that with the new dispensation in land revenue, control over land passed largely into the hands of moneyed men from cities, with no connections with the soil. Such a view was buttressed by the fact that a number of great estates were now run by men with no prior connections – banians, agents of the British, and merchants. Krishna Kanta Nandy, Hastings’ banian, was one such beneficiary of the Permanent Settlement. The Tagores were another example of this. Further, there is no doubt that in many cases, at least initially, old zamindars did more or less disappear overnight. In Bengal, the big proprietors of Rajshahi, Dinajpur, Nadia, Birbhum, Bishnupur and Midnapur suffered worst, and only the Burdwan Raj survived. In Orissa, between 1804 and 1818, according to Chaudhuri, 51.6% of the old proprietors were eliminated. Throughout the area affected by Permanent Settlement, big zamindars lost their land or substantial portions of it ( while smaller zamindars generally escaped with greater ease ).

However, as Siraj-ul-Islam and Ratnalekha and Rajat Ray have argued, the assumption of a permanent and cataclysmic shift in the social composition of landholding is mistaken. Contrary to colonial expectations, there was no sudden flood of city wealth into the countryside. The harshness of the Sunset Law may have prevented investment in agriculture; further, the urban rich preferred the opportunities offered by business and commerce in Calcutta, which was also becoming an increasingly profitable enterprise. The low demand for the rights auctioned under the Sunset Law indicates that capital investment from outside was limited. Thus, to a large degree, land circulated among the old rural elites, among existing landed families. In terms of lived experience, there was evidently much dislocation among those who lost land, but in sociological terms there was no fundamental shift – at least not from country to town – in the composition of landholding. The change that did occur was that greater social and economic power tended to accrue to some of the zamindars of smaller, medium-sized estates, who took advantage of the buoyant land market to slice off portions of the great estates. Thus, there was a shift in balances of power within the rural elite.

Subinfeudation was, in a sense, the central social consequence of the Permanent Settlement. Although the social composition of land control didn’t change substantially, property circulated very rapidly through land sales. Because of the alienability of land, a new trend emerged: zamindars often controlled land in widely dispersed areas. Since it was complicated to physically collect rent from scattered landholdings, they tended to prefer to create intermediate tenures. Thus, there emerged a larger body of people with revenue collection rights, the Permanent Settlement or comparable arrangements being reproduced at subordinate levels. Talukdars holding revenue rights under the zamindars were often encouraged to pay their dues directly to the government. The zamindars, in their turn, sold patnis, or rights to collect revenue independently from a stipulated area. By 1819, the Rajas of Burdwan had created as many as 1495 patnis, and these were often subdivided in their turn. Thus, the direct relationship between zamindars and the State represented only the topmost rung in a very elaborate, multi-layered structure of social relationships turning on the issue of land rights.

Subdivision of land rights had an important long-term consequence. The class of rentiers grew numerically, but in individual terms the proportion of very rich zamindars declined. Besides indicating a reason for the absence of substantial capital investment in large-scale production ( while the revenue-rent gap did increase in the nineteenth century, subinfeudation meant that this did not mean massively enhanced profits for individual zamindars ), this process also implied that a large number of rentiers were not exclusively landholders, precluding other social identities. While city wealth did not enter the countryside initially, in the long run, with the stabilization of the zamindari system and the shrinking of business opportunities in Calcutta in the mid-nineteenth century, there emerged an educated, professional middle class with one foot in the Permanent Settlement, holding some land, but not in an amount sufficient to rule out other activities. Thus, the Permanent Settlement provided a base for the Bengali middle class of the nineteenth century ( although this was an accretion to rather than a displacament of older rural elites ).

Finally, the Permanent Settlement, as it became interwoven into the social experience of peasant society, had a significant impact on agrarian relations. The very promulgation of a settlement in perpetuity for landholders had implications that were complex. On the one hand, the policy seemed to have safeguards for ryots written into it: protection from the levy of extra cesses, and the recording of ryots’ obligations and rights on legally binding pattas. ( However, as Marshall points out, the compulsory renewal of pattas every ten years encroached upon many customary and `permanent’ rights enjoyed by peasants ). On the other hand, as Guha argues, the ideological assumption inscribed within the Permanent Settlement was that the relations between landlord and tenant could substantially be left to take care of themselves. Further, the prime purpose of the Settlement in its final form was extractive and exploitative, much more ruthlessly so than advised by Francis. The British were aware that the raised revenues they demanded could only come, initially at least, from enhanced rents, and so the rights and powers of zamindars were actually reinforced and extended in early nineteenth-century colonial legislation. Regulation VII of 1799 ( haptam ) entitled the zamindar to distrain or confiscate the ryot’s effects the minute he fell into arrears, without the trouble of having to go through normal legal procedures to prove his case. Regulation V of 1812 ( pancham ) gave ryots the right to contest distraint, but also revoked earlier regulations that had entitled them to renewable ten-year leases. Throughout the course of the nineteenth century, peasants were to fight significant battles – against arbitrary enhancement of rents, eviction, and specific forms of surplus appropriation. Several of these struggles were successful – the British enacted favourable tenancy laws in 1859 and 1885 – but this did not alter the overall context of zamindari domination. In the early years of the Permanent Settlement, the scales were, however, weighted much more decisively on the side of big landed property. In a context of increasingly unfavourable land-labour ratios, what the Permanent Settlement effectively did was consolidate a situation where the zamindar commanded immense effective social and physical force vis-à-vis peasant society. In particular, the judicial rights enjoyed by zamindari courts were effectively greatly enhanced, since the extension of British control over legitimate force was compensated ( for zamindars ) by an increased autonomy in the administration of local justice, which frequently included beatings and tortures of peasants.

Peasant society, however, was not an undifferentiated whole, and there were multiple and shifting gradations of hierarchy within it. The general picture was one of impoverishment , especially in the moribund delta of western Bengal. The social landscape of the region was marked by a mass of small cultivators, sharecroppers and under-tenants, further hierarchized by caste. However, there did exist important categories of rich ryots, who in practice frequently shaded into the class of intermediary tenure-holders, and also – at particular conjunctures – became important in leadership of tenant struggles. The mandals or village headmen acted as mediators in the fixation of revenue assessments, frequently under-assessing themselves, and proving harsh and arbitrary collectors. According to Marshall, the mandal, the local moneylender, and the zamindar’s agent constituted a trinity of intermediary power-holders who oppressed the poorer peasant cultivator and landless labourer.

The central proponents of the historical importance of the prosperous upper ryot ( or the jotedar ) have been Ratnalekha and Rajat Ray. Ratnalekha Ray argues that the jotedar constituted a major force in Bengal agrarian society well before the Permanent Settlement, in many cases deriving his power from controls over actual production processes. Frequently, jotedars organized cultivation on a sharecropping basis. This argument highlights the continuities within agrarian society, in opposition to the idea that the Permanent Settlement marked a fundamental shift in social relations in the countryside. The jotedar phenomenon is one aspect of this, and so is the view that the institutionalization of the zamindari system was more a recognition of existing patterns of land control and power than the creation of unprecedented property rights. In an essay on zamindars and jotedars in Bengal, Ratna and Rajat Ray assert that both these categories ( which they –perhaps oversimplistically – assume can be distinguished sharply and unequivocally from one another ) had deep roots in the 18th century. Both a class of more or less hereditary revenue-collectors with near-proprietory rights in revenue management, and a class of rich and socially dominant peasants with enough effective force at their disposal to command the labour of impoverished cultivators, according to this argument, can be identified in pre-Permanent Settlement Bengal. This view is largely based on the data collected by Francis Buchanan in the early 19th century, data which pointed to an already developed distinction between jotedar and sharecropper in North Bengal only a few years after Permanent Settlement. Certain continuities do appear striking. Ratna and Rajat Ray also argue that despite the enhancement of rents, there was no flattening out or universal impoverishment of the peasantry, since zamindars and jotedars frequently colluded in the oppression of lower ryots. Further, as conflicts over rent and social power between these two categories developed in the nineteenth century, they argue, the jotedars generally had the upper hand, and accumulated substantial benefits.

These arguments can be located within what Neeladri Bhattacharya identifies as a second shift in the historiography of agrarian relations, the focus of Guha and Stokes on intellectual contexts and milieux being replaced by particularistic, local-level studies highlighting continuities in social relations and the execution of policy, rather than a sharp historical break. It is certainly true that Ratna and Rajat Ray’s arguments considerably nuance, and in some ways transform, the traditional assumption that the Permanent Settlement constituted a cataclysmic break in agrarian history. However, it has been argued, notably by Sugata Bose, that this particular view has been overdrawn, and the categories it uses tend to generalize. The evidence cited by Ratnalekha Ray pertains essentially to that part of North Bengal that was the subject of the Buchanan Report of 1808. Bose’s three-fold ecological division of Bengal leads him to suggest a more regionally differentiated picture of rural society. The jotedari phenomenon, he argues, was largely confined to North Bengal, where there was a lot of unoccupied frontier territory that in this period was allotted by zamindars to jotedars. In the active delta of eastern Bengal, re-fertilized constantly since the seventeenth century by the slow eastward shift in the Ganga river system, the cultivation of jute – in an era of growing commercialization – led to the development of a prosperous and upwardly mobile peasant economy, less marked by social differentiation and hence by jotedari. In the moribund delta of western Bengal, adversely affected by the eastward swing of the rivers, there was much stagnation, rural poverty and differentiation, but no significant jotedar concentration. The importance of Bose’s argument lies in his recognition that rural inequalities did not constitute a structure stable across space, but varied immensely across ecological divisions. Further, the critique of Ray’s argument also opens up a space for the recognition of the fact that the application of fixed categories to describe a changing and regionally diverse agrarian society may in many cases be misleading. The scale of inequalities in rural society, as Bose points out, varied from yawning chasms to minute differences: thus, the identification of a rich or middling peasant stratum would always depend on what this prosperity was relative to. This latter, naturally, would vary across space. Bose suggests that a more convenient means of understanding rural divisions can be found in identifying the owners of adequate and inadequate land, keeping in mind regional and ecological differences. He also cautions against an under-estimation of zamindari power within the land structure, which an assumption of an excessively diffused power structure might run the risk of doing. 

To conclude, it appears that the Permanent Settlement was set in motion by certain specific needs of the colonial administration. However, the ways in which these needs were read, and the forms of their articulation, were anchored within a definite ideological and intellectual context. Since this context itself was undergoing transformation ( from mercantilist doctrine, through physiocratic arguments, towards an ideology of unqualified private property and free trade ), the Permanent Settlement in its final form was produced as the result of important debates over both policy and underlying assumptions. Once promulgated, however, the Settlement enjoyed only limited and qualified success. It ensured a certain stability in revenue collection and –eventually – in property rights, thus also creating a political bulwark for its rule in the zamindari class, but many of the more ambitious aspects of its vision for rural social transformation were not realized. On the other hand, it created a context ( and fed into pre-existing contexts ) for transformations and social struggles that would have not been easy to anticipate in 1793. While many of the agrarian conflicts of the nineteenth century were based in conditions antecedent to the Permanent Settlement and colonial agrarian policy generally, it is also true that, insofar as struggles around the issues of occupancy, tenure and rent were fought out and resolved on the site of colonial law, formal and legal arrangements pertaining to land remained central to the articulation of agrarian relations. Thus, the Permanent Settlement constituted not a resolution of colonial revenue and agrarian policy, but rather a benchmark, a point of origin from which land-specific administrative decisions could develop, and a new point of reference for relationships, tensions and struggles within agrarian society.

 BIBLIOBRAPHY

 

  1. Ranajit Guha: A Rule Of Property For Bengal: An Essay On The Idea Of

Permanent Settlement

  1. Peter Marshall: Bengal: The British Bridgehead
  2. B. Chaudhuri: Agrarian Relations: Eastern India (from Kumar, ed., NCEHI, II)
  3. N.K Sinha (ed.): History Of Bengal (1757-1905)
  4. Ratnalekha Ray: Change In Bengal Agrarian Society
  5. Sugata Bose: Peasant Labour And Colonial Capital: Rural Bengal Since 1770
  6. Burton Stein (ed.): The Making Of Agrarian Policy In British India, 1790-1900

(essays by Rajat and Ratna Ray, Neeladri Bhattacharya )