The longue durée of social change

Detailed chapter description

PART XV turns from sectoral and period-specific analysis to synthesis. Chapter 143 asks what becomes visible when the social history of Mithila, Vajji and Anga is examined across very long spans of time rather than divided into isolated ancient, medieval, colonial and contemporary compartments. The term longue durée is useful only if it does not flatten change. Rivers, settlement corridors, agrarian land, kinship, languages and sacred places can persist for centuries, but the institutions that organise them repeatedly change. A riverine plain may remain densely settled while property rights, labour relations, market access, state boundaries and migration strategies are transformed around it. This chapter therefore treats continuity as historically produced. It does not assume that a present-day caste category, linguistic identity, marriage rule, religious institution or regional boundary existed unchanged in the past. The governing method remains the one established throughout Volume II: archaeological evidence for prehistoric and early agrarian phases; inscriptions, coins and securely dated texts for ancient society; manuscripts, land grants and genealogical records under dating control for medieval change; settlement, census, revenue, print and administrative sources for the colonial period; and official statistics, surveys, legislation and peer-reviewed research for the contemporary period. The aim is synthesis without timeless essences. Long-duration history asks which structures survive across several political regimes and which processes alter them slowly enough to escape event-centred narratives. In this region, river systems, alluvial soils, dense settlement, cross-border mobility and the household have unusually long histories. Yet none is socially self-explanatory. The Kosi does not generate one fixed social order; land around it can be cultivated under different tenures, embanked under different engineering regimes and inhabited by households whose income increasingly comes from migration. A longue durée approach therefore separates persistence of physical or institutional form from persistence of social meaning. The same village, shrine, script or marriage network can occupy a different place in economy and authority at different dates.