East India Company Expansion and the Remaking of Agrarian Relations

Detailed chapter description

Between the military victories of the East India Company in the 1750s and 1760s and the Permanent Settlement of 1793 lay nearly three decades of experimentation. The decisive change was not that a wholly new agrarian order appeared overnight after Plassey or Buxar. Rather, a commercial corporation acquired political leverage, then fiscal sovereignty, and gradually inserted its own supervisors, councils, collectors, auctions, revenue farmers, courts and accounting practices into an older Mughal–Nawabi system of zamindars, amils, qanungos, patwaris and village producers. Bihar is especially revealing because the transition can be seen through Shitab Rai’s revenue administration, the Patna Revenue Council, early experiments in Tirhut, the Rajmahal–Bhagalpur supervisory system and the uneven fiscal geography of Monghyr. This chapter follows that transition from 1757 to the eve of the Permanent Settlement. It therefore stops short of treating the 1793 settlement itself in detail; that belongs to Chapter 55. The remaking of agrarian relations began before the Company directly collected land revenue. Plassey in 1757 enlarged Company influence at the Bengal court, but it did not transfer the countryside into a British administrative system. The Battle of Buxar in 1764 was more consequential for Bihar because Company forces defeated a coalition that included Mir Qasim, Shuja-ud-Daula of Awadh and the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II. Even then, military victory had to be converted into fiscal authority, administrative routines and enforceable claims over local intermediaries. The agrarian transition was therefore cumulative: war altered sovereignty; treaties redistributed rights; revenue institutions changed more slowly. Buxar linked Bihar’s political history directly to the making of Company rule. Mir Qasim had earlier shifted his capital to Monghyr and attempted to strengthen nawabi authority against Company interference. His defeat removed a major regional challenge. The settlement that followed brought the Company into a new relationship with the Mughal emperor and the Bengal nawab. From this point Bihar was not merely a corridor for Company trade or military movement. Its land revenue became part of the fiscal foundation of a territorial regime whose military and commercial ambitions increasingly depended on collections from the countryside.