East India Company Expansion and the Remaking of Agrarian Relations

Research record

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.

Section index

1. 54.1 Company expansion was a sequence, not a single conquest
2. 54.2 Buxar made Bihar central to the Company’s territorial state
3. 54.3 The Diwani grant of 1765 changed the legal claim to revenue
4. 54.4 “Dual government” describes divided responsibility but can conceal continuity
5. 54.5 Shitab Rai embodied continuity in Bihar’s early Company revenue system
6. 54.6 Revenue became inseparable from the Company’s fiscal-military needs
7. 54.7 Commercial privilege and fiscal sovereignty reinforced each other
8. 54.8 The 1769 supervisors marked a first attempt to see inside the districts
9. 54.9 The Patna Revenue Council brought Bihar under a new supervisory centre
10. 54.10 Tirhut reveals how experimental the early district system was
11. 54.11 Bhagalpur shows both information failure and fiscal leakage
12. 54.12 Monghyr and Anga exposed the limits of paper sovereignty
13. 54.13 The famine of 1770 was a severe test of the transitional regime
14. 54.14 In 1772 the Company decided to “stand forth as Diwan”
15. 54.15 The Committee of Circuit turned assessment into a travelling inquiry
16. 54.16 The quinquennial settlement changed the incentives of collection
17. 54.17 Zamindars were neither simply abolished nor already modern landlords
18. 54.18 Raiyats faced changing collectors more quickly than changing cultivation
19. 54.19 Indian fiscal expertise remained indispensable
20. 54.20 Arrears linked fiscal pressure to credit and coercion
21. 54.21 The failure of the five-year experiment led to shorter settlements
22. 54.22 Tirhut’s restored collectorship in 1782 shows continuing uncertainty
23. 54.23 Bhagalpur’s collectorate linked fiscal administration to frontier governance
24. 54.24 Revenue experiments altered local political competition
25. 54.25 Revenue administration and justice became increasingly entangled
26. 54.26 The production of records was itself a form of agrarian intervention
27. 54.27 Territorial revenue financed an expanding colonial political economy
28. 54.28 By the 1780s the problem was no longer whether to rule, but how
29. 54.29 The decennial settlement was an endpoint of experimentation, not yet the Permanent Settlement
30. 54.30 Conclusion: Company rule remade agrarian relations through institutions before it fixed property law

Cite this record

Gajendra Thakur. “East India Company Expansion and the Remaking of Agrarian Relations.” Videha Digital Research Archive: Mithila–Vajji–Anga. Videha — https://www.videha.co.in/ · ISSN 2229-547X · GitHub mirror: https://videha-ejournal.github.io/videha/ · Digital Research Archives on GitHub: https://github.com/videha-ejournal. https://videha-ejournal.github.io/mithila-vajji-anga/records/history/social-54/