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Under British colonial rule, agriculture was a major source of livelihood for more than two-thirds of the economically active population in South Asia. However, growth rates in agriculture were stagnant and inequality in the region increased, a trend that continued well after 1947. This chapter discusses why growth in agriculture was so uneven, why there was continuity in the regional pattern of agrarian change, and why growth was low overall. It examines agrarian change in India over the period, 1858–1947, along with trends in agricultural production and income, resources and techniques (soil, water, equipment, seeds, livestock), the expansion of the agricultural commodity market, agricultural crops (indigo, opium, cotton, wheat, rice, sugarcane), agriculture in major regions such as Punjab and Deccan Plateau), land market, labour market, credit market, and the effects of commercialization. The chapter concludes by assessing the factors behind the slow growth in Indian agriculture during the colonial period.

Both influential scholarly works and development policy provide a powerful discursive space to the idea of local or pre-modern knowledge and community control over natural resources. This chapter provides a critique of both the ideas of the superiority of local or pre-modern knowledge and of community as a suitable form of institutional control over resources. It locates the transformation of pre-modern tank irrigation technology in the socio-agrarian context of Karnataka in the last four decades. The author ultimately argues that technological artifacts are not inert objects. They articulate with a complex mix of social tensions, relations of power, and ideological systems, and are transformed in historical processes. Those who advocate artifacts and knowledge systems as objects of values and virtues fail to capture their social and political scripting, thus denying technology as a historical process.

This chapter discusses the politics of groundwater markets and its interrelation with social differentiation and class–caste relations. Based on an intensive social anthropological study of a village in north Gujarat, it investigates the factors that shaped unrestrained use of groundwater and the responses of various social groups. These factors range from the issues of access and control over productive resources such as land and groundwater, a local ecology that endorsed groundwater development and institutions like groundwater markets, and sharecropping that mediated the change process. The chapter uses a triadic framework of agrarian institutions, ecological variables in agrarian change, and the domain of the state in influencing nature and society. Further, it locates the context of the study in the larger political economy of Gujarat where dominant classes have determined differential class-based access to productive resources through sources of legitimacy and power.

Chapter 7 continues to explore agrarian change, by examining the means of intensification. As arable land became more restricted, and less favourable plots in dry regions came to be relied upon, late antique farmers resorted to increasingly intensive farming methods. This chapter argues that the crop monoculture, though often assumed, was rare to non-existent, and that the more common practice was a mixed agricultural regime of small-scale animal husbandry combined with intensive orchard and vine cropping with cereals squeezed into the matrix where possible, not dominating it, as has been presumed. The adaptation of new crops is proposed. Finally, the increasing use of irrigation (qanat and saqiya systems) implies great investment in agrarian structures both in terms of labour and money investment.

Despite their similarities, the projects of the reformers and the policies adopted by the Bourbon monarchy were inspired by very different principles and objectives, while new and less visible economic forces were also working in other ways to undermine the feudal order and agrarian relations. This chapter examines how the monarchy's attempts to reform feudalism from within (using feudal law to challenge the nobility's privileges in the army, to exercises the right of devolution of feudal properties, and reintegrate the common lands) and its experiments in absolutism (against the autonomy of the Sicilian nobility and following the Calabrian earthquake in 1783 and the creation of the Cassa Sacra) were unsuccessful but by arousing expectations of reform that could not be met dangerously exacerbated social tensions.

This chapter is based author’s revisit to two villages of the Panipat district of Haryana during 2008–9, after a gap of 20 years (first studied in 1988–9). The chapter provides a historical overview of the process of development and change in the two villages. Introduced during the late 1960s, Green Revolution technology brought about significant economic changes and also transformed social relations of production in the region. Though processes of change have continued, empirical study of the rural society has been out of fashion since the early 1990s. Through the revisit, author explored the nature of change during the past 20 years. The chapter particularly focuses on the changing nature of caste and class relations, rural power structure, and the emerging relationships of the two villages with the neighbouring urban settlements in terms of employment and aspirations.

The dominant narratives of ‘farmers’ suicides’ typically claim that it has a ‘farm-related’ causality and that the incidence of such suicides as registered in government statistics are remarkably high across time. This chapter interrogates the positivistic epistemology underlying the claims. These grounds include the presupposition that farming-related reasons behind suicide are self-evident, official suicide statistics can be used uncritically, and that ascribing motives to suicide officially is an objective and uniform exercise that is devoid of social and cultural processes. A critical realist methodology for explaining suicide is adopted. The chapter then proposes the analytical constructs of agrarian capitalism, egoism in social relationships, and status-oriented consumption as three important means for understanding the local modernity of Anantapur and its relationship to local suicides. A description of the manner in which wider national and global economic and social processes relate to local structures and norms, and create grounds for actions in these spheres helps explain why and how suicide is conceived and committed in local farming communities.

This chapter discusses changes in the ownership and distribution of land across caste groups in one village between 1963–4 and 2006–7. The data used for this chapter comes from a detailed resurvey of one village—Dongargaon—in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra in India. The most important feature of agrarian change in Dongargaon between 1964 and 2007 was a sharp rise in landlessness. If 27.7 per cent of households were landless in 1963, the share of landless households in 2007 was significantly higher at 63.6 per cent. Marathas and Kunbis were the most dominant landowners in 2007. The rise in landlessness between 1963 and 2007 was due to two reasons. First, the demographic composition of Dongargaon appears to have undergone changes between 1963 and 2007. Secondly, there was a net loss of land among village residents between 1987 and 2007.

Chapter 4 explores the origins of Bangladesh’s relatively advanced policies regarding women in the development project, which it traces to the perception that the economic basis for customary gender relations had broken down irretrievably in the wake of the war and the famine. The break had its roots in a longer process of agrarian crisis, but was triggered in particular by mass wartime rapes and the emergence of a distinct population of women without male protection in the early 1970s. Following Deniz Kandiyoti, this moment of rupture is analysed as the ‘breaking of the patriarchal bargain’. From this moment, several of the key orientations towards gender-aware public policies and programmes emerged.

To understand Scotland’s population histories it is frequently necessary to explore what was happening below Regional level. A database of Scottish civil parish populations from 1755 to 2001 is used to explore changes in population density and growth over time. Maps show density in 1801 and in 2001, decade population peaked in each parish, and growth from 1801 to 1851, 1851 to 1891, 1891 to 1951, and 1951 to 2000. Attention is drawn to some of the principal causes of change, including modifications to agrarian systems, fishing, new and declining industries, mining, on commuting to nearby major urban centres and oil-related development.

This chapter argues that there is a need to relook at the forest dependence question given the changing and perhaps declining nature of forest dependence amongst local communities. It highlights a number of points: first, that dependence on the forested commons should be contextualized within the wider dependence on land-based common property resources; second, that while dependence on the forested commons is significant, forest-based livelihoods might not be adequate in and of themselves; and third, that there are increasing ‘external’ pressures on the commons that threaten livelihoods. As external pressures on the commons are chiefly responsible for declining dependence, it is suggested that local governance of the commons should not be ‘justified’ on the basis of economic dependence alone (nor denied on the basis of a decline in such dependence) but rather as a means of democratizing the governance of common property.

This chapter examines the dispossession of Rajpura for the Mahindra World City. It shows, first, how the Rajasthan government used real estate to produce compliance to dispossession. It then examines the initial consequences of this dispossession for both the village and the SEZ’s investors. Dispossession enabled Mahindra to arbitrage on the discrepancy between the cost of dispossessed land and its ultimate value as residential and commercial real estate, and to establish a tax-free enclave for India’s already booming “knowledge economy.” Conversely, it generated a cascading disaccumulation of agrarian assets within Rajpura. Dispossession undermined direct access to means of production and subsistence, destroyed a remunerative livestock economy, worsened already acute water shortages, and imposed disproportionate costs on women. It was against these substantial losses that Rajpura’s villagers weighed any gains from the SEZ.