Agrarian Order Research Articles

Agrarian Development in Indonesia: Post-Reformation Legal and Sociological Perspectives

The basic principles of Indonesia's agrarian order are influenced by customary law and are one of the most important basic structures of life in the nation and state. National agrarian development from the Old Order to the New Order experienced a complicated level of problems. This study wants to know and trace national agrarian developments from the perspective of post-reform law and sociology in Indonesia. This research is a socio-legal research that is descriptive and analytical. This research shows that in the legal perspective of the agrarian sector after the reform there are still many inequalities between one regulation and another, the protection of rights in these regulations itself is bulldozed by various regulations, policies, and programs created by the government. Meanwhile, from the sociological perspective, agrarian conflicts are still rife after this reform. Conflicts caused by policies or decisions of public officials (central and regional), involve many victims and cause widespread impacts, which include social, economic, and political dimensions.

Glorious pasts of forest dwellers: Memories of land in the ex-zamindari of Borasambar, Central Provinces, 1861–1905

AbstractThis article discusses the shifts in rights over land of Binjhal Adivasi people in the wake of colonial rule in the ex-zamindari of Borasambar, located in the British Central Provinces in the eventful period from 1860–1926. Oral narratives and documents preserved by Binjhal villagers juxtaposed with archived records of military expeditions, village surveys, administrative letters, and land settlement reports reveal how Binjhal ancestors lost titled land and offices of headmanship, which, over time, impoverished and diminished them in the rural hierarchy. The research finds that the codification of selective custom as legal rights accommodated colonial land policies to promote social change and agricultural improvement. Environmental histories document how nineteenth-century forest enclosures and agrarian order brought Adivasi areas within state control. Revisionist research highlights historically contingent outcomes of colonial rule. The Adivasi pasts in this article reveal how the interpretations of legal culture by local actors, who transacted with the administration, led to variable outcomes for a pre-colonial land-controlling group. By examining the truth claims in fragments of Binjhal voices and narratives about them, in village memories and archives, through a threefold examination of the past—pragmatic, habitual, and episodic—this article explores the historicity of Adivasi land memories. Here, stories of past glory lead to claims of legal entitlements rather than restitution of ancient rule, and injustices are described in the idiom of disrupted kinship and transgressions of women, illuminating the varied routes through which groups residing in relatively non-agrarian upland habitats became Adivasi.

Post-agrarian aspirations: tourism and rural politics in Ecuador

ABSTRACTThis ethnographic study examines post-agrarian aspirations and rural politics in Ecuador. After decades of urban outmigration under a neoliberal agrarian order, many rural places have witnessed efforts to develop local tourism economies as a possibility to transcend stigmatised agrarian livelihoods and to (re)constitute communities. We build on anthropological studies of aspiration to explore how visions of post-agrarian futures are shifting the actors, scales and terms of rural politics in the present. Through two case studies, we observe how state actors have come to re-inscribe their role within post-agrarian imaginaries, partially rewriting the terms of state legitimacy in rural places.

The Complexity of Contemporary Rural Society: Agricultural ‘Betterment’ and Social Realities in Semi-arid Zimbabwe

Abstract Modernist assumptions have guided rural development interventions in Zimbabwe since the mid-twentieth century. As a result interventions were not firmly grounded on rural socio-economic and physical realities. The aim was not only to create a society of ‘modern’, ‘progressive farmers’ who followed a predetermined agricultural path, but also, the quest for order and modernity was clearly manifest through centralization measures and increased emphasis on prudent land husbandry. This article seeks to demonstrate that these rural development initiatives were ill-suited to the socio-physical realities in some rural societies. Using a case study of a communal area in semi-arid north-western Zimbabwe, it stresses the importance of the physical conditions, the socio-economic dynamics and the particular livelihood trajectories of rural households. It concludes that, even if the state in Zimbabwe was to succeed in imposing an agrarian order driven by these models, such a policy was more likely to end in dismal failure.

Unfinished Trials and Sentences

Unfinished Trials and Sentences

El mundo rural bonaerense después de Caseros. Encrucijada entre la costumbre y el impulso de un orden institucional moderno rural (1854-1858)

The present work sought to investigate how Buenos Aires countryside was affected by the political situation of Buenos Aires after Caseros in 1852. The political and intellectual world of Buenos Aires promoted an institutional model for the province that later sought to relocate the country, but the old agrarian order resisted changes. The construction of a rural legislation could not be a cut of the past to insert the new modern visions adopted from the western capitalist world. The agrarian capitalism that had been taking root in the base of our productive activity must be accompanied by our Hispanic roots in order to achieve sufficient success so as Argentina enter the new market economy. Official documents of the period 1853-1858 were used, obtained in the General Archive of the Nation, in order to know what interests the government and landowners had when participating in the construction of an institutional order for the province according to the new structures of power that were taking hold inside and outside of Buenos Aires, and that invited immediate decision-making in the vortex of economic situations that privileged the advantages of the Pampas region towards the Atlantic market. The reading and analysis of institutional correspondence between government / landowners allowed to see the commitment and attention that the creation of the mentioned article deserved, and the diverse perspectives they had about the complex rural reality of the River Plate.

The Soviet Village Revisited

The recognition of family farms and agricultural cooperatives as catalysts for agricultural recovery during the perestroika years went along with the rediscovery of the world-famous theoretician of the peasant farm Aleksandr V. Chaianov. The economist’s rehabilitation resulted from the changing conventions of public discourse towards the end of the Soviet era. Yet, Chaianov’s return needs to be linked also with the official image of the rural economy in the preceding decade when in academic and political debates on private subsidiary farms the socialist village took on new contours. Household farming which had previously been condemned as either a ‘petty-bourgeois’ mode of production or an indicator of the incomplete transition to socialism, was accepted as a component of socialist agriculture. Mirroring a new understanding of socialism, this paradigm shift was an important precondition for the broad public response to Chaianov’s rehabilitation. In the end, the turn towards family farming and co-operation remained an intellectual and political phenomenon with barely any impact on the agrarian order itself. The economic legacy of the Soviet era and local power constellations prevented a fundamental change of the rural order in favor of household-based agriculture.

Imperiale und lokale Loyalitäten im Konflikt: Der Einzug Russlands in die Ostseeprovinzen in den 1840er Jahren

Imperial and Local Loyalties in Conflict: Russia’s Coming to the Baltic Provinces in the 1840s The paper focuses on the issue of imperial representation in a non-Russian and non-Orthodox “European” environment in a time when these categories gradually became more important. In this respect, the 1840s marked a watershed for the mutual relationship between the imperial centre and the Baltic periphery. The traditional estate-based loyalty between local German elites and St Peters - burg officials was challenged by two factors: First, the conversion movement that affected around 100,000 Estonian and Latvian peasants who converted to the “Tsar’s faith” in order to express social protest against the local agrarian order - much to the surprise not only to German landlords but even more so to imperial officials. This was seen first and foremost as disloyalty to the protestant German agrarian upper-class, but in challenging the provincial Status quo conversion challenged imperial order as well. Second, the emerging vision of a national empire (Mark Bassin) questioned not only German local domination but also the government’s estate-based relationship with the strategically and economically vital Baltic provinces. Nicholas I ordered his officials in the region to square the circle - to guarantee peace and order and to make sure that Orthodoxy was protected without encouraging conversion. Nevertheless, in 1845 he appointed an Orthodox Russian as Governor-General to Riga, a position previously held most often by non-Russians of predominantly local German origins. However, Governor-General E. A. Golovin, a well-served soldier, had to face another representative of the imperial order - suffragan bishop Filaret who did all he could to support the converts. After Golovin was dismissed in 1848, Nicholas sent another Russian officer to Riga, A. A. Suvorov, who represented the European vision of the Empire. Suvorov served in Riga for more than 20 years despite a sharp conflict with Filaret right from the start. Only after Filaret was transferred to another church province, Suvorov displayed a pro-Orthodox agenda as well, without, however, insulting the Baltic Germans. First, he supported the initiative to make Riga and Mitau an independent diocese (erected in 1850). Second, he vigorously discriminated the Old-Believers in the Baltic provinces in order to bring them back home to the Orthodox Church. Thus, under Suvorov “Russification” began with forcefully integrating local Russians. It was precisely this traditional way of administering the Baltic provinces based on estate solidar - ity that provoked harsh criticism from another Russian key figure who happened to be a witness of the Baltic conversion movement. Iurii Samarin created a national Russian vision of the empire to be displayed in the Baltic provinces. However, in claiming Russian ethnos and religion to be the main objects of loyalty for every non-Russian subject, Samarin went too far not only for the Baltic German elite, but also for the Emperor who had him arrested accusing him of disobedience and creating ethnic hatred. The 1840s thus were a watershed precisely because of the estrangement of German and Russian elites, as outlined in the paper, caused by the issue of Estonian and Latvian converts.

Armut auf dem Lande: Mitteleuropa vom Spätmittelalter bis zur Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts (review)

Reviewed by: Armut auf dem Lande: Mitteleuropa vom Spätmittelalter bis zur Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts Larry Frohman Armut auf dem Lande: Mitteleuropa vom Spätmittelalter bis zur Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Edited by Gerhard Ammerer, Elke Schlenkrich, Sabine Veits-Falk, and Alfred Stefan Weiß. Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2010. Pp. 227. Paper €35.00. ISBN 978-3205784951. Poverty and poor relief in the countryside have long been stuck with the short end of the scholarly stick. Cities had a disproportionate amount of wealth with which to assist the needy, and even in the early modern period they were the place where the action was with regard to social reform; in addition, urban institutions left behind a far greater volume of written records for historians to plunder than their rural counterparts. This volume joins a growing body of literature that has undertaken to redress this historiographical imbalance for the period stretching from the late Middle Ages to the end of the old European agrarian order in the nineteenth century. In the first substantive essay, Helmut Bräuer ponders the methodological problems involved in capturing the “mentality” (i.e., the patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting) of the poor. Recovering their experience, Bräuer argues, requires combining an understanding of the ways in which the concrete social milieux inhabited by the poor, and the normative statements of the authorities, constrained the resources and life choices available to these persons, with an awareness of the ways in which these structural determinants were mediated by the intellectual and affective categories through which the individual attempted to make sense of his or her fate. Bräuer concludes that, all caveats notwithstanding, many of the sources used by the contributors to the volume, including petitions and “begging letters,” do provide faithful access to the mental world of the poor. The next two chapters assay the geographical and social space inhabited by the itinerant poor. Gerhard Ammerer argues that the itinerant poor did, in fact, appropriate—if only provisionally and with limitations—the public and private spaces through which they moved, but that their spatial dispositions and practices of appropriation were tightly constrained by the available opportunities for satisfying their basic material needs. This appropriation, he maintains, was made possible by itinerants’ accumulation of practical knowledge about the best places to find alms and shelter and about those to avoid, such as roads and other spaces where the itinerant poor would be most vulnerable to the police. Ammerer suggests that the itinerant poor did develop a partial sense of belonging that was, to a certain degree, shared by the settled population. Otto Ulbricht, for his part, challenges widespread claims regarding the social and moral marginalization of itinerant women beggars. He argues that the relatively low proportion of women among the itinerant population can be traced to the availability of gender-specific work in the countryside, but that women had to be mobile in order to avail themselves of such opportunities. While work provided one mechanism of social [End Page 387] integration for the poor, Ulbricht argues that women whose circumstances forced them to beg occupied a recognized place within geographically bounded communities. He also describes the ways in which their gender inflected encounters between them and individual donors and local authorities. In the following essay, Sabine Veits-Falk similarly takes up the question of female poverty, but approaches the issue from a different perspective. She argues that the gendered virtues of subordination and self-sacrifice, which were constantly preached to the women of the rural underclasses, often contributed to the impoverishment of these serving women, who were then further disadvantaged in their quest for assistance by their failure to adhere to the very gender roles that had contributed to their misfortune in the first place. The focus of the five essays that make up the second half of the book shifts from poverty to forms of assistance in the countryside. Sebastian Schmidt’s comparative look at poverty and poor relief in the English county of Essex concludes—not surprisingly—that the Elizabethan poor laws gave the English poor a greater sense of entitlement than was the case in central Europe. German communities also held to certain...

Complexity, Change, and the Historiography of the Old South

Complexity, Change, and the Historiography of the Old South Matthew Mason (bio) Loren Schweninger , ed. The Southern Debate over Slavery, vol. 2: Petitions to Southern County Courts, 1775-1867. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008. xviii + 424 pp. Abbreviations, glossary, bibliography, and index. $60.00 Lacy K. Ford . Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2009. viii + 688 pp. Abbreviations, notes, and index. $34.95. While these two volumes differ in nature, they both reinforce the growing emphasis on complexity in the historiography of the Old South. Along with much other scholarship in recent decades, they challenge the view, whether in antebellum proslavery treatises or twentieth-century history, of the Old South as a stable, monolithically proslavery, agrarian order. Both at the level of ideas and politics in Ford's extended monograph, or in the ground-level conflicts highlighted by Schweninger's edition of court documents, readers will catch a view of a slave South that was far from simple or unchanging. Both books also center around Southerners speaking to other Southerners, which imposes some limits—especially on Ford's analysis—but has the virtue of stripping away the polemical glosses in which defenders of the slave South wrapped their message to the outside world. The 180 petitions in Schweninger's edition (out of more than 14,500 gathered for the larger project, on microfilm) were the product of a wide array of types of cases, and thus they touch on slavery in a variety of ways. But the petitioners are all bent not on bolstering an external defense of slavery, but rather on winning their respective cases. This lends weight to Schweninger's argument that these documents not only "provide direct, firsthand accounts about specific events," but do so "with remarkable candor" not exceeded by any other kind of source (pp. 3-4). Because the slaveholding petitioners spoke so directly and unequivocally in cases concerning the property value of their slaves, "the petitions reveal, in stark and graphic ways, what it meant for the slave-owning class to possess people as property" (p. 12). These sources thus [End Page 61] confirm the growing historiographical emphasis on the aspects of American slavery that treated African Americans primarily as fungible assets. And those masters whose petitions spoke frankly of freedom as the ultimate reward for faithful slaves, and otherwise expressed qualms as to the justice of slavery (see, for example, pp. 98 and 134), bolster the interpretations of scholars—including Ford—who dwell on Southern whites' tortured ambivalence about Southern bondage rather than on the unyielding logic of "positive-good" theoreticians. But the parts of Schweninger's introduction emphasizing the variegated within Southern slave society are themselves in tension with other interpretations he advances and, to my mind, with some of the documents themselves. The petitions for divorce from white slaveholding women, he argues, "reveal the harsh realities of plantation life, providing details" of tyrannical husbands and masters, details often "excluded from diaries, letters, recollections, and many other sources." The world they "reveal" to the courts is one of "adultery, interracial sex, alcoholism, violence, brutality, abandonment, incest, and insanity" far in excess of non-slaveholding societies (p. 6; see also 27-28). On the strength of these and other types of petitions, Schweninger also dismisses the work of "some historians" who have portrayed the master-slave relationship as one involving negotiation and compromise. "Petitions," he states directly, "provide very little evidence that such was the case" and much evidence of "the savage nature of human bondage" (p. 9). And if the petitions depict masters as brutal despots, they depict slaves as engaged in "a constant struggle" for their freedom (p. 10). The documents following the editor's introduction give the reader no reason to question this characterization of the frightful world they reveal. The question is how representative the documents are. The fact that these are legal documents would seem to mean that they would represent, by their very nature, the extremes of both masters and slaves. The less brutal slave drivers among the whites, and the less committed freedom fighters among the blacks, would be exponentially less likely to...

The Property of Empire: Islamic Law and Russian Agrarian Policy in Transcaucasia and Turkestan

At the center of this essay is an analysis of the implementation of discourses on Islam and in Russian colonial policy in Transcaucasia and Central Asia. The essay seeks to analyze how the common (European) language for describing property rights (the language of Roman law) was applied to landholding in the world, and whether that influenced Russian land policy in its borderlands. Briefly, my hypothesis is that Russia's policy on property in its southern borderlands in the 1870s-80s invoked a vision of a normal (European liberal) of absolute private property. Against the background of that model, the Islamic model of landholding was perceived as a deviation. At the same time, however, the perceived specificity of indigenous laws provided an opportunity for local colonial administrators to circumvent norms of property relations: Russian colonial administrators, following the views of certain Orientalists, interpreted the Islamic model of property in accordance with the administration's goals in the region and used this interpretation to enlarge the state domain. This policy of enlarging the state domain by limiting the rights of settled tenants, however, was ultimately rejected by the government as a politically and economically ineffective method of advancing Russia's colonizing goals in its borderlands. Therefore, as I try to prove, the Russian government deliberately refused to accept the of patrimonial state property in its colonies. This article, while focusing on specific episodes of Russia's colonial land policy, addresses a number of broader questions in the history of Russian and European colonialism and law: the problem of legal pluralism, (1) continuity and succession of rule after the conquest; and the problem of taxonomy, classification and translation of legal notions and principles. I also emphasize the role of colonial experience in shaping basic concepts for the empire--that is, the concepts of property (private and state) and possession. Russia's agrarian policy on its borderlands mirrored the specificity of Russian civil law and revealed stunning contradictions between the European legal framework inbuilt in the legislation and the reality of Russia's politics of property. Before I turn to the much-debated issue of law and its integration into the legal system of multinational empires, a few words outlining the structure of this article are in order. To explain the complexity of factors involved in the shaping of property law in the borderlands, I must address various issues that are not obviously connected to one another. Thus the structure of the narrative is as multilayered as the object of study itself. I begin with an analysis of the major differences between the 19th-century European approach to the definition of property and that of legal doctrine; then I briefly address one particular example of how these understandings were reconciled in policy--that of agrarian policy in French colonial Algeria (1830-63). This example is of particular importance to the analysis of Russian legal policy in the former Ottoman provinces of Transcaucasia and Central Asia: as in these newly Russian provinces, in Algeria the French had to deal with the heritage of the Ottoman Empire, and they built their system of land property on the basis of that model. As I demonstrate in this essay, in spite of these similar foundations, French and Russian rulers arrived at different models for the agrarian order. Yet the French example continued to exert great influence over Russian civil legislation on property. Equally important in shaping Russia's attitude to the problem of property in its Muslim provinces was the agrarian reform launched in the Ottoman Empire in 1858. As I seek to demonstrate, a peculiar translation and interpretation of the Ottoman Land Code allowed Russian colonial administrators to install a regime of state property in almost all lands of the conquered Turkish provinces. …

Agrarian Capitalism and Struggles over Hegemony in the Bolivian Lowlands

In 2006, President Morales announced that his administration would end land inequality in Bolivia. Agrarian elites in the lowlands department of Santa Cruz, known as the economic engine of Bolivian agriculture, strongly oppose this position and have vowed to counter it to safeguard the agrarian order. From visions of a capitalist moral compass of production to the promotion of sector unity to safeguard production, agrarian elites are seeking to maintain a hegemony that allows them to control the agrarian sector in the lowlands. Attention to the ways in which agrarian elites ground their struggles over agrarian hegemony is necessary for evaluating the possibilities for the resource democracy advocated by the current administration.

Gold, Allegory, and the Commodity Form: Reflections on José Donoso's Casa de campo

Gold, Allegory, and the Commodity Form:Reflections on José Donoso's Casa de campo Alessandro Fornazzari (bio) According to the poet Pablo Neruda, José Donoso was destined to write "the great Chilean social novel."1 Yet instead of being recognized as the Chilean Balzac, Donoso's literary project has perhaps become best known for its modernist disarticulation of the very possibility of a realist novel capable of accessing a vision of totality. This modernist approach is based on a partial analysis of Donoso's work, privileging his formally experimental novels such as El obsceno pájaro de la noche and Taratuta: Naturaleza muerta con cachimba over more realist-oriented work such as Coronación, Este domingo and El lugar sin límites. This essay does not attempt to claim Donoso for one faction or the other. Rather, it works towards a reformulation of the question regarding whether Donoso is really a Lukacsian realist whose novels "reflect" the unity of economics and ideology as an objective whole (the ever elusive concept of totality), or on the contrary whether he achieves a high modernist vision, tearing heterogeneous bits of reality away from their social contexts and juxtaposing them in order to produce subjectivist narratives. The argument that this essay advances is that it is the unrelenting tension—and ultimate crisis—of these two aesthetic and cognitive forms (realism and modernism) in Donoso's work that makes him so valuable for understanding the historical transformations brought upon by the Chilean neoliberal transition. The crisis of these two forms coincides with a historical turning [End Page 31] point in Chile, the 1970s transition from one regime of accumulation (an industrial and traditionally agrarian order) to another (neoliberal capitalism). Since his earliest writings Donoso has expressed an ambiguous and at times capricious relation with the different variants of the Latin American realist tradition. He has explicitly rejected the criollista novel's mimetic realism, its exclusive concern for the rural (understood as a nostalgia for an agrarian past in an era of immigration and economic expansion), and its search for an autochthonous literary expression. This position vis-á-vis a certain form of the Latin American realist novel would seem to situate Donoso firmly within the Latin American literary boom's cosmopolitan aesthetic project; it reinforces the boom's parricidal tabula rasa myth and the claim that the preceding realist narrative project had been devoured by a descriptive and documentary passion for nature. Yet two immediate problems result from this positioning of Donoso within the modernist boom project—this approach cannot account for the entirety of his literary production (including some of his best work such as El lugar sin límites), nor can it go beyond the cliché that conceives the rich and varied tradition of Latin American realism in terms that are too mimetic, too rural and too local. Donoso's novels represent a continuation—however contentious—of a critical realist tradition rather than its rupture. Because of the split in the critical reception of his work, his novels have been read as both a notable expression of realist narrative and as marking a seemingly radical break with it (El obsceno pájaro de la noche is generally considered the paradigmatic example). Realist readings of Donoso's realist novels emphasize his description of the fragile and decadent upper crust of Chilean society with a language that is richly local and transparent (as in the work of critics Hugo Achugar, Hernán Vidal, and Antonio Cornejo Polar, for example), whereas modernist perspectives emphasize Donoso's radical signifying strategies, subversive and experimental attitude toward social institutions and language, and refusal of totalizing narratives (Philip Swanson, Sharon Magnarelli, Ana Dopico and Adriana Valdés, among others). The question then is—how do we understand or resolve this realist/modernist tension that has polarized the reception of Donoso's work? Can it be simply explained as a progressive change in his writing and aesthetic project? Is there an early realist Donoso versus a late modernist Donoso? Alternatively, I argue that the dyad is a constant and productive tension throughout his work; one that will reach both its pinnacle and ultimate limit in the 1978 novel Casa de campo, which...

The Familial World of the Company’s kacceri in Early Colonial Madras

The Familial World of the Company’s kacceri in Early Colonial Madras Bhavani Raman The English East India Company’s offices or kacceris (Anglo-Indian: Cutcherry, Kahcherri) are widely acknowledged as the nerve centers of the British Empire in India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century but their micro-practices have been remarkably understudied. Studies of colonial administration stress the continuity of pre-colonial administrative practices in the Company kacceri and present it as a place where lower-level Indian officials and servants severely subverted and compromised the intentions of colonial policy and reform.1 Robert Frykenberg’s pioneering study on South India’s Guntur district, for example, conceived of imperial integration through colonial revenue and judicial policy. According to Frykenberg, imperial integration was restricted to the elevated realm of juridical law because corrupt and venal rural magnates and local elite continued to dominate the everyday practice of statecraft by continuing earlier practices.2 Since then, scholarship on colonial knowledge has underscored the role of the objectifying practices of documentation in the exercise of colonial power while vigorously debating the contributions of subordinate agents, especially scribal specialists, language teachers, and translators (and their important pre-colonial antecedents) to the production of the forms of knowledge that underwrote technologies of dominance. These debates on colonial knowledge have yielded a rich harvest of studies on service specialists, but they have also often overlooked the locus of much of that knowledge production: the colonial bureau, the “office” or kacceri.3 In a way, then, studies of colonial knowledge forms and colonial administration have underscored the role of elite mediators in the exercise of colonial power but neglected to investigate the social form of the kacceri of the early colonial state in South India. The Company kacceri was a site of everyday struggles over sovereignty in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The exigencies of colonial conquest created an urgent and self-perpetuating crisis of trust between Company administrators and their local subordinates while enabling select subordinate officers to accrue a great deal of influence over the agrarian order of Madras Presidency. The crises of trust greatly determined kacceri culture because it often resulted in officials describing their subordinates as venal, nepotistic and hence, corrupt. Scholarly accounts tend to take these descriptions of nepotism to represent evidence of Indian exceptionalism or primordial casteism. 4 In contrast, kin and family ties—“the networks of nepotism”—that bound the kacceri cadre into factional clusters contain some clues that can help frame the patrimonial character of work in the kacceri. This paper suggests that the idiom of family, social and kinship networks, in the constitution of the kacceri is integral to any understanding of the exercise of colonial power. Kacceri history, then, is not just intertwined with the histories of the social groups who compose the administration, in itself a sparsely researched topic, but this history can illustrate how the Company kacceri reworked rather than merely continued to foster existing idioms of lordship and devotion. Company masters secured the loyalty of their subordinates by greatly intensifying hierarchical ties while simultaneously buttressing the power of their subordinates over inhabitants in new ways. Family, Kin and the Kacceri How did everyday familial practices of patrimony constitute the early colonial bureaucracy? Scholars drawing on feminist theory have used the category of the family as a tool of social history, even as they have recovered its heuristic and material constitution through the discourse and practice of colonial law in South Asia.5 But even if the material and ideological restructuring of kin relations by colonial law is widely acknowledged, the importance of kinship to state making in South Asian historiography has been restricted to the pre-colonial period. Historians of the state have for long seen the familial as pre-capitalist/pre-modern, replaced by a rule bound colonial bureaucracy. For this reason, familial or kin relations in the early colonial Company office are understood as a survival of an earlier era that resisted reform. Recent scholarship fundamentally questions these assumptions. In addition to recent attention in South Asian historiography, familial practices have begun to receive attention as crucial to the political expansion of European trading companies...

Things Fall Apart: The Cinematic Rendition of Agrarian Landscape in South India

This article explores the transitional decade of the 1970s in the history of the southwestern state of Kerala, India, through the films and novels of M.T. Vasudevan Nair, arguably the most important litterateur in Kerala today. After the historic election of a Communist ministry to power in 1957, Kerala then stepped gingerly back from a radical politics and moved towards a restitution of an older masculine, agrarian order. By looking at the shifts in politics and the social order simultaneously with the progression of Vasudevan Nair's own filmic sensibility, the article raises the question of whether historical time and filmic time can be easily mapped on to each other.

The Human Tradition in Antebellum America

The Human Tradition in Antebellum America. Edited by Michael A. Morrison. (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 2000. Pp. xxiv, 251. Cloth, $60.00; paper, $19.95.) Convention has it that collections are so uneven in quality as to make an overall judgment very difficult. That cliches does not apply to Michael A. Morrison's The Human Tradition in Antebellum America. Cavils can be raised about a couple of weak essays and long headnotes, which tend to repeat substantive essays that follow them. But on balance collection is a genuine achievement. Morrison has compiled a series of wide-ranging contributions that give reader a sense of interplay between private lives and public affairs, enabling one to recapture contingency of past and to enter a world shifting from a traditional agrarian order to a complex protocapitalist society. The contributors to collection do not entirely move beyond great men and portray the lives of ordinary citizens, as he asserts (xiv). Rather, essayists have selected paradigmatic notables that illuminate themes and disputes of antebellum history. In doing so, they also have addressed ideological rhythms in America's social, economic, and political life, emergence of new marginal forms after older ones calcified. A quick summary cannot do justice to diverse, complex, and nuanced subject matter of these essays, but nonetheless one can extract central themes: decline of meritocratic values, corresponding democratization of politics and society, emergence of individualism and self-made man, Revolutionary War legacy of popular religion, contemporary views of minorities-women, blacks, Indians-and complexities and contradictions afflicting human condition. The very first essay establishes high scholarly character of virtually all that follow. Stephen R. Grossbart's account of Connecticut's Abraham Bishop -teacher, lawyer, orator, politician; critic of high Federalists; spokesman for republicanism; ally of Jefferson and Connecticut Wits; and opponent of ecclesiastical and civil tyranny (11)-shows a life that mirrored national politics and enlarges our knowledge of social and political landscape down to 1820s. Ruth Alden Doan's sketch of John Wesley Young further illuminates democratization of popular culture in era. Doan sets Young's conversion experience against campfire meetings that swept across North Carolina frontier, empowered ordinary people, and became part of what Nathan Hatch, in The Democratization of American Christianity (1989), termed this explosive conjunction of evangelical fervor and popular sovereignty (9). The contradictions of Young's life and behavior-he was a slaveholder who had a sense of spiritual, biracial brotherhood with blacks-are acknowledged but not explained. Two other essays also have frontier as venue. Craig Thompson Friend limns Kentucky merchants who established a commercial empire stretching from New Orleans to East Coast and became part of growing southwestern market infrastructure and mercantile sector. Andrew R. L. Cayton portrays Senator John Smith of Ohio against backdrop of a frontier society characterized by growing commercial capitalism. A man at center of America's economic development (70), Smith had army supply contracts and eventually became involved with General James Wilkinson and Aaron Burr conspiracy. Like a number of subjects of these essays, Gary J. Kornblith's subject, a self-made lumber dealer, was a deeply conflicted man. Engaged in a lifelong pursuit of material gain, Hiram Hill nonetheless was plagued by doubts, troubled by an admittedly too selfish disposition, and beset by the horrors of a guilty conscience (62). And again, his life is set in context of a shifting economy-from an older agrarian order to a factory system and an age of rampant individualism. The collection continues with sketches of three figures deeply involved in Indian removal. …

People of the Wachusett: Greater New England in History and Memory, 1630-1860

People of the Wachusett: Greater New England in History & Memory, 1630.1860. By David Jaffee. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,1999. Pp. xiii, 306. Illustrations, tables. $39.95.) The founding of New England and the development of its town-centered culture have long claimed a central place in the American historical imagination. In People of the Wachusett, David Jaffee argues that the distinctive pattern of serial town settlement in New England-the sequential founding of new towns by settlers from older towns-and the writing of local histories about town founding hold the key to understanding New England-and indeed emergent American-culture. To demonstrate his thesis, Jaffee undertakes a kind of genealogical exploration of one particular sequence of town settlements beginning in the Wachusett, an area of north central Massachusetts in what is now Worcester County. He shows how community growth was accommodated by what he describes variously as a hiving off ' or budding process (3) in which the English settlement of the town of Nashaway (later Lancaster) in the 1640s spawned a spreading matrix of towns at and beyond its borderlands, ultimately pushing northward along the upper Connecticut River into northern New England and finally into the South Shore of Nova Scotia. As town founding advanced, commercial activities intensified and commercial villages coalesced. Jaffee follows the conventions of recent western history in taking a transnational approach to the cultural development of a greater New England frontier that included Nova Scotia. But Jaffee argues that Frederick Jackson Turner's model of the democratizing frontier experience was not realized here because serial town formation tended to retard social change by promoting the replication of a conservative, largely consensual, agrarian order, permitting adaptive and evolutionary change but discouraging innovation (3). This conception of the creative yet conservative effects of serial town formation is one of the many strengths of this book. Another is Jaffee's textured account of the vicissitudes of NativeAmerican relations with English settlers in the Wachusett region and their significance in shaping frontier culture. An early relationship of peaceful exchange characterized by the coexistence of two Nashaways, one Indian and one English, gradually disintegrated in the face of rising Indian indebtedness, increasing pressures to alienate Indian land, and other factors. Growing hostility led the Nashaways into Metacom's War, during which Lancaster and many other settlements in the Washusett were destroyed or abandoned. Lancaster's residents resettled but faced intermittent warfare between 1688 and 1713 that was renewed in the 1720s and erupted sporadically over the next two decades. Town founding, then, was punctuated by retraction and resettlement, by episodes of defensive warfare and Indian-fighting forays; nonetheless, the process of serial town settlement and expansion of New England social institutions persisted, continually adapting to changing conditions. Employing Pierre Nora's notion of the lieu de memoire, Jaffee shows how the New England town became a powerful site of symbolic memory in the hands of its local storytellers. Throughout the progressive settlement of greater New England, local historians (including, of course, Mary Rowlandson) crafted narratives about the experiences of colonization, memorializing town founders and Indian fighters, reshaping the past to make meaning of early struggle and warfare, of adaptation and change, of advancing commercial development. …

Migration and urbanization in the Ruhr Valley, 1821-1914

The author analyzes the human consequences of urbanization and geographical mobility for residents of Duisburg in the Ruhr Valley of Germany during the century-long transition from an agrarian order to the industrial era. By documenting the dynamism of Duisburgs population before the arrival of heavy industry the continued interdependence of urban and rural life into the industrial era and the importance of households and social networks during the entire nineteenth and early twentieth centuries this study reshapes the conventional understanding of central European migration patterns. It also reveals social realities that were apparent neither to contemporaries nor to many historians--for instance that the highly visible movement of ethinc minorities and foreigners to Duisburg was actually dwarfed by the migrations of regional folk that local migration had far more impact than either emigration to North America or the appearance of Poles in the Western regions and that a powerful ideology of return impelled migrants to maintain rural contacts. (EXCERPT)

Conflict and Compromise: Class Formation in English Society, 1830-1914

First published in 1982, this study explores the dynamics of class formation during the vital decades between 1830 and 1914, when a rising urban industrial order was developing in complex interdependence with a declining rural agrarian order. The book follows the divergent paths of two cities - Birmingham and Sheffield – in their social development. These paths reflect the complex process of conflict and compromise as the ‘old’ order was gradually replaced by the ‘new’. It studies in detail many aspects of social life that were affected by these changes such as education, public administration, political structures, public administration, religion, the professions, popular culture and family. This book will be of interest to those studying Victorian history and sociology.

: The Peasant and the Raj: Studies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion in Colonial India . Eric Stokes.

APPLIED ANTHROPOLOGY nature and pattern of village social, economic, and political life are thus of vital concern. One must note that, regarding rural development, no regime (not the Christian Democrats, Allende's Popular Unity, or the present dicta- torship) really allowed the campesi nos basic ini- tiatives. None have had faith in the ability of rural people. No leaders were truly committed to relinquishing that modicum of power to the torturable class, to use Graham Greene's memorable term . This is an essential book for students of Chile and anyone concerned with peasant life and rural proletariats in the development process. It is also an easily used reference and a model of scholarly achievement . The Peasant and the Raj: Studies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion in C.Olonial In- dia. Eric Stokes. Cambridge South Asian Studies, 23. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978. viii + 308 pp. $27.50 (cloth). Karen Leonard University of California, Irvine Officials of the British East India Company sought to understand unfamiliar social and cul- tural systems, above all the system of land ten- ure, as they assumed administrative control of ever-larger portions of the Indian subcontinent from the late 18th century. It was certainly a problem in applied anthropology, one that pro- duced voluminous records and debates over issues both theoretical and practical. According to much of the historical literature, British mistakes in the assignment and collection of land revenue led to large-scale transfers of pro- prietary rights to land and helped provoke peas· ant uprisings, notably in the Rebellion of 1857 . Pointing to errors and overstatements in this lit- erature, Eric Stokes has turned to British settle· ment reports to attempt a reconstruction of the complex Indian agrarian systems and their functioning under colonial rule . Stokes is a historian. In this collection of 12 studies (all but one published previously in jour- nals and books in England, India, and the U.S. from 1967 to 1977), he formulates hypotheses relating secure agriculture to population den- sity, the various forms and functions of tenure, the degree of social and economic stratification, and participation in political processes. He tests his hypotheses in detailed case studies. Three examine particular North Indian districts dur· ing the 1857 rebellion; two trace the historical evolution of North Indian landholding and agriculture from 1860 to 1948; one focuses on moneylenders and peasants in central India; one tries to explain why tax-free (inam) tenure was least prevalent in northern India . The studies are densely written, demanding famil- iarity with 19th-century sociology, Indian rev- enue terms , and British legal categories. Stokes has couched his discussion in the terminology of 19th-century political economy, making his findings less comprehensible and useful for comparative purposes than they deserve to be . While the detailed studies will be of most in· terest to regional specialists, three general in· terpretive essays synthesize historical evidence and the views of other scholars in a very read- able and stimulating way. In one of these , Stokes assesses the impact of the first century of colonial rule; in another, he relates the 1857 Mutiny Rebellion to traditional resistance movements and Afro-Asian nationalism . The final essay, Return of the Peasant to South Asian History, is particularly fine , combining conclusions reached in his own detailed studies with wide-ranging and critical comments on current social-science work on peasant societies. In an earlier, perhaps the narrowest, chapter of the book, Stokes explores official efforts to apply Western legal categories to Indian social reality (the Ricardian rent theory vs. Richard Jones's theory of peasant rents); in this final essay, he is able to show the relevance of that early l 9th- century debate to neo-Marxist theories concern· ing the rich peasant and underdevelopment in rural India. His point is that theory has gotten ahead of empir ical inquiry, and he succeeds in demonstrating the need for fuller explication of the historical dimension of India's agrarian order.