Dispossession and differentiation of the peasantry in the Punjab during colonial rule

Abstract

The Punjab has often been described as a land of small peasant proprietors. This description may have been true when the British completed the colonization of India by conquering the Punjab in 1850. But this certainly was not the case at the end of British rule a hundred years later when less than four per cent of the agricultural population owned more than 50 per cent of the land while poor peasants, landless sharecroppers and agricultural labourers accounted for 80 per cent of the population. This paper documents this dramatic transformation and examines the process by which it came about.