Book review: Peter Robb,Agrarian Development in Colonial India: The British and Bihar

The new book by Peter Robb covers the two territories of the colonial agrarian history of Bihar and the history of agrarian development. Robb narrates the first of those within the primary template of colonial policy and its impact. For those familiar with Robb’s decades-long work on property, law, land and tenure in colonial Bihar, the novelty of the latest monograph lies in its interpretive leap wherein the book places agrarian history within the framework of a history of development. How does one write a history of development that has been characteristically associated with state actions backed by expertise and an intent to bring positive economic change within sovereign territories in the twentieth century? Is there a colonial version of development that is accessible to a historian’s eye? The book under review portrays a history of development as a history of state interventions by the colonial state.

The field of Development Studies is over-theorised. Against that backdrop, the current book is a welcome addition in providing a history of development from the bottom up in which colonial interventions in the agrarian realm are presented in an empirically grounded narrative of case studies. Robb’s key assertion in this regard is that ‘The last 70 years or so of British rule saw a transition to the government intervention that dominated until at least 1980’ (p. 25). The level of public spending by the colonial state generally rose in the later part of the nineteenth century and saw a meteoric 200% jump between 1900 and 1918. And even though the share of land revenue to colonial finance declined proportionately in the same time range, colonial officials channelled public spending toward ‘real India’, that is, rural India, in an outreach going above and beyond the troublesome ‘intellectuals’ and nationalists. The trigger for this channelling of resources stemmed out of multiple contexts—the visible depredations of famines, the opportunities made available by advancement in agricultural sciences and due to pressure from the nationalists. There was no vortex of coordinated and coherent policymaking in this regard that might have been decided from the top. There were also equivocations in making policies for sure, ‘but the direction of travel [in policies] was unmistakable’ (p. 25).

There is another perspectival choice that the book makes at the outset. Arguing that to find faults with imperialism is ‘neither informative nor instructive’ (p. 3), the book marks a rupture from a prior dominant trend in agrarian history within the nationalist/Marxist framework in South Asia. ‘Who was to blame is less interesting than what went wrong’, Robb writes (p. 4). Colonialism provides a segue to a discussion and analysis of the broader processes of economic and social change under colonial conditions. This is in keeping with the author’s correct contention that Development Studies as a field has remained ‘uninterested in history’ (p. 9). This tendency to avoid analysing through the trope of exploitation alone does not mean depoliticising development or growth. Indeed, political economy is at the front and centre of the book. So, for instance, the science section is divided into one part dealing with science and superiority, addressing the ideological elements, and another part on benefit and loss, addressing more directly the economic dimensions. There is considerable coverage of property law and tenure relations and of the connection that colonialism established with international trade that in turn impoverished cultivators. Focused on policy, the book offers a better representation of diversity of official opinion, and yet ventures into explaining colonialism’s control and impact on Bihari cultivators through a deeper and more nuanced engagement with colonial records. The colonial impact in terms of poverty remains a guiding principle for the arguments, as in other social scientific literature on development. Equally importantly, the book shows that the system of agricultural production promoted by colonialists had inbuilt force inhibitors that were ultimately anti-developmentalist for the majority. The European planters engaged in indigo, sugarcane and tobacco cultivation might have flourished due to the rising connection with international trade, but that made no difference in alleviating rural poverty. The book also extends the field of development studies by moving the loci from the abstract state to its concrete agents—the bureaucracy and the planters that it supported.

Having committed to writing the history of the processes of agricultural development, Robb settles on a three-fold division of subjects. The first section of the book covers colonial state policies, paying close attention to ideological antecedents in Britain and to the making of colonial policies through constant adjustment to the local situation, which nonetheless did not pay dividends in the end because state officials anyway applied what they were familiar with through their western experience. The second section deals with scientific and technological inputs, research institutions and the context in which the results of these initiatives were at best incremental and, in most cases, ineffectual, save for the large estate holders. Broadly, the ‘independent peasant proprietors’ were the key target of colonial efforts (p. 109). The third section covers multiple case studies in canal irrigation and village-level water management, famines and steps to mitigate them, property law, crop production, and their failings and minor successes. In a nutshell, all three sections cover the story of efforts that were made to pursue production and growth in the agrarian economy. Development was the pursuit of economic growth. Development’s history was mostly about crafting colonial land laws, colonial agrarian policies, promotion of trade and application of science to agricultural production.

While the totalising control of the state on agrarian subjects is debatable, the state was always lurking in matters of commodity trade, agricultural production and technologies. And the book explores the role of the colonial state and a diversity of responses by the landlords and tenants. The title ‘Benefit and Loss’ for one of the key chapters illustrates how development measures were imagined, implemented and assessed by state and non-state actors. Even when changes in the village economy could not be directly traced back to the state’s initiatives, they could be loosely attached to British policies. Whatever the precise metric chosen across chapters, the book describes the gradually rising intervention through the course of the nineteenth century.

The colonial state officials never considered one pathway alone. There were those—such as the Lieutenant Governor of Bengal, Ashley Eden—who believed that once commensurate property laws were put in place and tenancy laws were fixed, development would follow suit (p. 117). Perspectives like Eden’s were opposed as well. The point is that there was a diversity of views on the advisability and scope of the state’s role in promoting technology, productive measures and enterprise. There were other well-devised ploys to bring commercial development through the promotion of crops and plantations (mostly through the agency of European planters). The ‘development thinking’, assuming ‘the cultivators’ to be its target, in reality, ran into a medley of economic groups: ‘landless, semi-landless and migrant labour, specialists and artisans, smallholders, surplus tenants, rich farmers, intermediary land controllers, rentiers at all levels and superior landlords’ (p. 119). The rural realm was also divided by caste, religion and legal status, besides the economic groupings. That might as well have been the premier shortcoming in the colonial state’s ambitions and imagination that proved to be its Achilles’ heel. The book’s ultimate focus on exploring the impact of development by covering agrarian history on the ground has allowed Peter Robb to pinpoint such blemishes and write a history of development from the bottom up.