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Podcast: New Books in Economic and Business History
Episode: Upal Chakrabarti, "Assembling the Local: Political Economy and Agrarian Governance in British India" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021)
Description: In 1817, in a region of the eastern coast of British India then known as Cuttack, a group of Paiks, the area's landed militia, began agitating against the East India Company's government, burning down government buildings and looting the treasury. While the attacks were initially understood as an attempt to return the territory's native ruler to power, investigations following the rebellion's suppression traced the cause back to the introduction of a model of revenue governance unsuited to local conditions. Elsewhere in British India, throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, interregional debates over revenue settlement models and property disputes...