The Problem of Property: Local Histories and Political-Economic Categories in British India

Abstract

AbstractThis essay considers—as an integrated space of discursive practices—disputes over proprietary titles in an obscure locality, debates over the authentic “Indian” proprietary form in British India, and a conceptual recasting of political-economic categories in Britain, over the first half of the nineteenth century. It argues that “property” was produced by this space as a marker of political power/sovereignty, its “indigenous/Indian” form being construed as a field of dispersed, contested, and plural rights. Positing this conceptualization of property as immanent in governance and political economy, this essay questions the dominant historiographic consensus that indigenous social forces aborted all attempts of the Company’s government to introduce a coherent property regime.