Rigidity and the Affliction of Capitalist Property: Colonial Land Revenue and the Recasting of Nature

Abstract

This article will argue that colonial rule had to simultaneously alter both agrarian society and Nature in order to implant the Company zamindari system in deltaic Orissa. This led the colonial government to recast the previously flood-dependent agrarian regime into a flood-vulnerable landscape. Which in turn, I argue, led to the rupture of land, in hitherto unprecedented ways, from its previous ecological weave with the deltaÌs hydrology. In effect, colonial rule could enforce its distinctness as a social and economic relation only by correspondingly instituting a new ecological context. Central to the colonial revenue strategy was the attempt to institute capitalist private property, which compelled them to treat land as an economic form, a rent-seeking alienable commodity and as a monopolized means of production. This sharp departure from the previous revenue practices in the region furthermore caused them to adopt formal and rigid administrative routines for enforcing a standardized rental instalment. Thus, the CompanyÌs taxing inflexibility was not spurred only by its rapacious Îrevenue hungerÌ but significantly because it was integral to realizing its particular mode of colonial appropriation.