Land Law in Colonial India

Land and Law in Colonial India

Anand V. Swamy
Williams College
December 2010

Forthcoming in Debin Ma and Jan Luiten Van Zanden eds. Long-term Economic Change in
Eurasian Perspective, Stanford University Press.

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1. Introduction

The East India Company’s conquest of various territories in India typically brought one issue to the forefront right away: How would land taxes, the principal source of governmental revenue, be collected? But taxation was not a thing unto itself; it was inextricably linked with “ownership” and indeed with the entire structure of land rights. For this reason, among others, the Company also created/adapted legal systems that would adjudicate the disputes that, inevitably, followed in the wake of its land-rights interventions. The legal and land tenure arrangements chosen also affected credit markets: to the extent land ownership is secure and transferable, land can be used as collateral, or seized in lieu of repayment of debts or other contractual obligations. Land, law, and credit in colonial India generated a huge (and ongoing) discussion: debates preceding policy choices; later commentary within the colonial administration; “nationalist” criticisms from the late 19th century onwards; and current research linking present-day economic outcomes to colonial era choices. In this paper we provide an overview of this literature, focusing on the period 1765-1900. In the interest of brevity and coherence we focus two regions, Bengal, which was first conquered (1757-64), and the Bombay Deccan, which was annexed in 1818, though we make references to other regions as well.
From the very beginning, Company rule in India generated an extraordinary amount of documentation. Policy discussions characterized the nature of pre-colonial regimes and land tenure systems, invoked the theories of contemporary economists and philosophers in Europe, and might even use surveys to gather information. Much of the discussion was

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