Commercialisation and landed proprietorship on the Malabar Coast in the eighteenth century

Abstract

This article proposes a systemic connection between cash-crop gardening, commercialisation and individually-owned landed property in late eighteenth-century Malabar on the southwestern coast of India. The discussion starts with a focus on the English East India Company’s (EIC) early nineteenth-century investigations into land tenure and land tax. It identifies an agreement of opinion between two EIC revenue officers, Thomas Munro (d. 1827) and Francis Whyte Ellis (d. 1819), otherwise known to occupy rival intellectual positions. Both of them agreed on the existence of privately-owned landed assets in the region. This article calls this agreement ‘the Malabar consensus’ and argues that it was founded on an objective, if not intimate, examination of a set of specific historical conditions. The first section explores the tenurial category janmam or the aṭṭipēṟu of the eighteenth century and describes certain procedural innovations in the realm of landed and agrarian assets which mark a generalised transition along the coast of Malabar during the early modern centuries. The second section attempts to explain a set of economic opportunities that the aṭṭipēṟu stakeholders, finding themselves in a political and economic transition, found available in the eighteenth century. These innovations and the opportunities they provided were instrumental in creating a substantial class of parvenue landowners, and also an equally significant social class of share-croppers and wage-earners whose emergence characterised the early modern Malabar experience.