The Great Agrarian Conquest: The Colonial Reshaping of a Rural World

Groundbreaking analysis of how colonialism created new conceptual categories and spatial forms that reshaped rural societies.

This book examines how, over colonial times, the diverse practices and customs of an existing rural universe-with its many forms of livelihood-were reshaped to create a new agrarian world of settled farming. While focusing on Punjab, India, this pathbreaking analysis offers a broad argument about the workings of colonial power: the fantasy of imperialism, it says, is ...