Agrarian commercialism in eighteenth century south India: Evidence from the 1823 Tirunelveli census

TY - JOUR

T1 - Agrarian commercialism in eighteenth century south India

T2 - Evidence from the 1823 Tirunelveli census

AU - Ludden, David

N1 - Funding Information: Ludden David History Department University of Pennsylvania 12 1988 25 4 493 519 sagemeta-type Journal Article search-text 493 Agrarian commercialism in eighteenth century south India: evidence from the 1823 Tirunelveli census SAGE Publications, Inc.1988DOI: 10.1177/001946468802500406 David Ludden History Department University of Pennsylvania Author's Note: Research for this article was funded by Fulbright-Hays and the Soci~i Science Research Council (supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities). Assistance by Abigail Abrash, Janet Cowell, Robb Gregg and above all Amy Iwata made the computerisation of census data possible. I am grateful to Dharma Kumar and Sanjay Subrahmanyam for comments on earlier drafts. India's agrarian landscape entered the modern intellectual world in the polemics of colonial policy debate. Opponents of permanent settlement strengthened their case in London with representations of village India, harmonious, static and self-contained, preyed upon by states for revenue from time immemorial.' Using documents in London, Karl Marx rendered polemical portraits of rural India intellectually durable. For Marx, that Indian states always needed coercion to pry loose revenue from self- reproducing village economies provided a key to India's Asiatic immobility.' 2 For Irfan Habib, a century later, it provided a key to Mughal decline as well, because excess extraction triggered agrarian crisis.3 Village self-sufficiency made taxation a zero-sum game. When states took too much, village deficit§ threatened social reproduction, and crises, including revolts, ensued. Nehru, Gandhi, novelists, and~ social scientists have continually 1 The politics of Thomas Munro's presentations to Parliament are detailed in Burton Stein's biography of Munro (forthcoming, Cambridge' University Press). For documents, see Walter Kelty Firminger, ed., Affairs of the East India Company (Being the Fifth Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons 28th July, 1812), Delhi, 1984. 2 Avineri, Shlomo, ed., Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization, Garden City, 1969. 3 Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India 1556-1707, Bombay, 1963. 100494 rediscovered India's landscape of self-sufficient villages. Repetition imparts veracity. Comparative and world historians have now added their voices: first Barrington Moore, then Eric Jonas, and recently Immanuel Wallerstein and world systems scholars.' . The image of village self-sufficiency lives, like a miraculous ascetic, on air. Even admitting evidence to the contrary, Irfayn Habib has invoked it again recently: . The entire centralised fiscal structure was inconceivable without extensive commodity circulation. This explained the considerable development of commerce, banking and insurance, and growth of urban centers specialising in manufacture of commodities for distant-markets .... But as far as we can see. Marx was right in stressing that it was by and large only the surplus which was converted into commodities, and the self-sufficiency of the peasant economy was not broken. The towns and their commerce were then entirely dependent on the system of state-enforced agrarian exploitatyon.5 ' .., ' Marx referred to India from ancient time, and Habib's research pertains to Mughal India. But many scholars now argue against both Marx and Habib concerning the centuries after 1500, that revenue for Mughal and other pre-colonial states depended on slow, perhaps but steady and widespread commercialisatioii, driven by many forces, including state revenue transactions. K.N. Chaudhuri, Om Prakash, Tapan Raychaudhuri, and others stress long-distance trade, and like A.I. Chicherov, expanding craft production. Sanjay Subrahmanyam stresses the rise of commercial magnates with portfolios that combined investments in banking, trade, and revenue collection. A new volume edited by John Richards focuses on expanding money supplies (which in China are also seen as a major force in early-modern development). Frank Perlin has stressed extended class formations that connected centres of state power with village economies; and Christopher Bayly forges the same kind of linkage through towns and bazaars. These scholars and others support a line of argument that I apply to southern Tamil Nadu: spatially differentiated but widespread trade expansion, 4 Bartington Moore, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in Making the Modern World, Boston, 1966; Eric L. Jones, The European Miracle: Environ ments, Economies, and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia, Cambridge, 1981; Immanuel Wallerstein, 'The Incorporation of the Indian Subcontinent into the Capitalist World-Economy', The Economic and Political Weekly, 21, 4, Review of Political Economy, January 25, PE28-PE39; and Ravi Palat, Kenneth Barr, James Matson, Vinay Bahl and Nesar Ahmad, 'The Incorporation and Peripheralization of South Asia, 1600-1950', Review, 10, 1, Summer 1986, pp. 171-208. 5 Irfan Habib, 'Classifying Pre-Colonial India,' in T.J. Byres and Harbans Mukhia ed., Feudalism and Non-European Societies, London, 1985, p. 48. 101495 capital accumulation, labour specialisation, and productive diversification generated commercial resources for state revenue during three centuries before British rule. States played active roles in India's pre-colonial agrarian economies, but deveiopment generated by workers and investors at key places in the countryside produced the commercial economy that states tapped for revenue and which they portrayed in scattered and fragmentary but consistent bodies of evidence." The landscape that Company officials documented in south India was not what they portrayed in their polemics in London. Company records produced and archived in India describe a landscape Marx would have assimilated quite differently into his historical theory of capitalism. But scholars have used only a small portion of the data in those records. So much evidence accumulated in Madras Presidency before 1821 that Governor Thomas Munro concluded that new village surveys would not be necessary for ryotwari settlements. But Survey Department officers had by then produced many statistical accounts of Madras and Mysore territories and Munro allowed collectors to employ Survey expertise if they wished. Commissioned by the collector of Tirunelveli (Tinnevelly), Thomas Turnbull compiled data from 629 localities. The result, the 1823 'Census and Dehazada of the Province of Tirunelvelie," is perhaps the most detailed statistical account of any part of India at that time. My purpose here is to portray the village landscape represented in Turnbull's 1823 Census and to argue that it characterised late pre-colonial as well as early colonial decades, roughly from 1740 to 1830. Space limitations prohibit a full description of the Census as text and database, but a 6 K.N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company. 1660-1760, Cambridge, 1978. Om Prakash, The Dutch East India Company and the Economy of Bengal, 1630-1720, Princeton, 1985. Tapan Raychaudhuri, 'Non-Agricultural Production: Mughal India,' and 'Inland Trade', in Tapan Raychaudhuri and Irfan Habih. cd. The Cambridge Economic History of India. Volume I: 1200-c.1750, Cambridge, 1983, pp. 261-307, 325-360. A.I. Chicherov, Indian Economic Development in the 16th-18th Centuries: An Outline History of Crafts and Trade, Moscow, 1971. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, 'Trade and the Regional Economy of South India, c.1550-1650,' Delhi School of Economics disscrtation, 1987. John F. Richards, The Imperial Monetary System of Mughal India, Oxford, 1987. Frank Perlin, 'Of White Whale and Countrymen in the Eighteenth Century Maratha Deccan: Extended Class Relations, Rights, and the Problem of Rural Autonomy under the Old Regime,' Journal of Peasant Studies, 5, 2, 1978. pp. 172-237. Christopher A. Bayley. Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770-1870, Cambridge, 1983. David Ludden, Peasant History in South India, Princeton, 1985. 7 Tamil Nadu Archives, Revenue Department Sundries No. 39. 'Census and Dchazada of the Province of Tirunelvelie' (henceforth: 1823 Census). For its origins, see R.H. Phillimore, Historical Records of the Survey of India, Dehra Dun, 1954-1956. v.III, pp. 166-67. For context, see Census of India 1961, Report on the Population Estimates of India (1820-1830), edited by Durgaprasad and Bibhavati Bhattacharya, New Delhi, 1963. 102496 large sample of its data will suffice for my purpose. Turnbull seems to have circulated a standard form to Tahsildars, for taluk data appear in a standard format and 185 standard items appear on taluk tables. Here I will use statistics on 122 standard items in the dehazada (or material census) tables for 159 census villages in four contiguous, western taluks: Shermadevi, Brahmadesam, Tenkasi, and Shankarankoil. [See Appendix]" These standard dehazada items are clearly standard items for Revenue apprehension. Indeed, Turnbull's work coincided with Revenue efforts to regularise administration, and making his count accurate would greatly assist revenue officers. The abolition of Company factories in 1821 meant weavers who claimed tax exemptions from their connection to the Company now had to be taxed.' Negotiations for ryotwari settlements meant village deductions' for tank repairs, village officers, religious institutions, and other items had to be put on the books. The unusual quality and quantity of data in the 1823 Census seem to result from a coincidence of Revenue Department needs, Turnbull's attention to the last major project of his long career in the Survey Department, and the special effort by the Tirunelveli collector's office, which together produced rich evidence for a depiction of a south Indian village landscape in 1823. ' Revenue and trade ' . In the history of revenue appropriation, 1823 is perched on the cusp between the long eighteenth century and later nineteenth century transformations. Figure 1 suggests continuity in revenue collections and paddy prices in Tirunelveli town across the eighteenth century. 1801, when the Poligar Wars ended and an English collector arrived, seems just another year amidst eighteenth century fluctuations. New trends begin about 1815. First collections stabilise and begin to rise in real terms. Then prices start trending lower, a pan-Indian phenomenon propelled, it seems, by Company policies, to lower price peaks dramatically during famine in 1831-1833 and reaching bottom in 1841, when prices start to oscillate higher until general inflation hits in the 1850s. "' Other economic indicators add impressions of continuity that bind 1823 to the late 1700s. Overseas cloth exports had begun to slide by 1821, when the Company's commercial factory was abolished and weavers working 6,000 looms for export markets had to look for other outlets. But they found inland markets without difficulty until the 1840s, when import 8 All statistics are available from the author. 9 Tamil Nadu Archives, Tinnevelly Collectorate Records (henceforth: TCR), v.7972, 1844, pp. 198-204. 10 Dharma Kumar, ed. , The Cambridge Economic History of India, Volume 2, c. 1757- c. 1970. Cambridge, 1983, pp. 55, 90, 103ff; Ludden, Peasant History, pp. 116-17. 103497 104498 competition became devastating, moturpha taxation oppressive, and tax resistance widespread among weavers." Trade in general may have expanded somewhat in two decades after 1801, a trend that the Company encouraged and taxed. The proportion of non-land revenue (moturpha, chayaroot rent, chank rent, abkari, salt monopoly, sea customs, stamps and inland customs) to total revenue jumped from eleven to nineteen per cent in the first decade of Company Raj and hovered around that figure through the 1850s.'2 The government also collected more land revenue in cash. In 1801, all nanjah (irrigated) land revenue was collected in grain by renters, to be sold over the course of the year. The Board was told that the proportion of nanjah revenue collected in grain was immediately reduced to 50 per cent and then to 40 per cent, in 1804;" but the proportion of total land revenue collections converted into cash from sales of government (melvaram) grain hovered around 36 per cent until 1825 , 14 There is virtually no data by which to track production before 1823, but revenue accounts do not suggest growth, rather oscillation around famine years, 1811-1813.'~ Before 1823, the Company modified the revenue system to put more information, authority, and eventually cash in the collector's hands. An 1804 survey produced an increase of 44 per cent in the nanjah and 68 per cent in the punjah (unirrigated) land area in Revenue accounts, but the collector explained that this did not mean revealing concealed cultivation; most of the increase came from standardising measurement terminology over the whole district. Measures were not standardised in villages. The seed kottai was still the amount of paddy land sown by one kottai of seed grain. The output and area of a seed kottai still varied with local usage. The chain to measure punjah lands still varied in length from place to place. But now the government used one set of terms to account for assessed land and the survey established a baseline for jamabandies. Local informants told the collector that no such survey had been completed before;" he had information with which to gain more control over revenue than any previous ruler. His power was further enhanced by the elimination of subregional land revenue renting. Men who delivered land revenue from taluks to the district treasury were no longer contractors. They were Company employees, their places of work, public buildings. Abkari, chank, chayaroot, and salt iryonopolies, as well as sea and land customs, were still rented. Village officers-mirasidars and headmen-were still effectively renters well after 1823. But after 1804, more revenue could be accounted 11 TCR, v.7972, 1844, pp. 198-204. 12 A.J. Stuart, A Manual of the Tinnevelly District, Madras, 1876, Appendix 10. 13 TCR, v.3600, 1805, p. 51. 14 TCR, v.7975, 1846, p. 69. 15 Ludden, pp. 135-55. 16 TCR, v.3599, 1804, pp. 14-23, 45-51. 105499 106500 for in cash and miscellaneous village taxes, like moturpha, were combined with land revenue in government accounts. Last but not least, former Poligars, now zamindars, were now under Company authority. As Figure 1 illustrates, and collectors were quick to point out to the Board, increasing the collector's authority would not pay rapid dividends in revenue. One thrust of Munro's ryotwari polemic seems correct: the Company regularised extant revenue practice. Excepting the substitution of tahsildars for subregional renters, changes wrought before 1823 were in official ideology, accounting, and reporting. Payments in rupees to the district treasury increased; but an eighteenth century array of coins still came to kutcheries." The number of taluks were reduced and jurisdictions shuffled. But in 1823, the personnel, centres, and dynamics of revenue production, transmission and accumulation remained basically those of the late 1700s inside taluks. State revenue moved from taluk to district treasury through a new chain of command, with more regularity, and under more centralised scrutiny. But an eighteenth century taluk revenue landscape was still in place. Abkari, chank, chayaroot, and salt revenues provided eight per cent of the district total in 1823. Diving for chank (or conch) shells (Tamil: sanqu) and making salt were coastal activities outside the area of our sample. Our four taluks define a region of 1,200 square miles, just to the east of the Western Ghats, west and north of Tirunelveli town. In the east and north lay expanses of dry, red-soil plains, dotted with rain-fed irrigation tanks (all of Shankarankoil and eastern Tenkasi taluks). In the western plain, along the road from Tenkasi to Srivilliputtur and Madurai, lay some heavily irrigated land watered by stream-fed tanks at the feet of the ghats (some in Shankarankoil, but mostly in Tenkasi). Farmland in the south and southwest was extensively irrigated by water from the Chittar (in western Tenkasi) and Tambraparni (in most of Brahmadesam and almost all of Shermadevi). The region is thus very diverse in agricultural endowments, including villages with 100 per cent irrigated land and villages with none. Cultivation statistics in jamabandy reports'" describe a gradient in ratios of wet to dry cultivation for the period 1825-1854: Shankarankoil had the lowest ratio (.15) and Shermadevi the highest (2.23), with Brahmadesam (.76) and Tenkasi (.53) in between. 1823 Census tables of land under wet and dry classifications describe the same gradient. Long-distance trade moved along routes connecting Madurai in the north, Tirunelveli town, and ports to in the east and west. Along these routes, trade in chayaroot (Tamil, saya; chebulic myrabalan) provided dye.stuff for very substantial cloth production in the region; and abkari revenues came from toddy and arrack sellers, abundant in major Census 17 TCR, v.3587, 1807, pp. 120-25, v.3582, 1807, pp. 267-69. 18 See Ludden. pp. 81-96, 269-70. 107501 108502 109503 . villages. Commercial traffic on these routes must have induced the Company to add inland customs stations after 1805. In 1805, there were eight chowkeys in the district and six at Travancore frontier, 1'1 In 1823, eight rC'~d and nine town custom chowkeys lay in our sample region alone. Table 1 indicates the composition ct trade through the sample region. The data pertain to the whole district, but with few exceptions items listed would have moved along major roads in our four taluks, roughly in proportions indicated. Some exceptions are palmyra jaggery, produced widely here but more a speciality of areas to the southeast and raw cotton (with and without seeds) which was produced here but would have come ~ mostly from eastern taluks on its way to Quilon, But tobacco was a speciality of farmers with wells in our region. Iron was produced exclusively at the foothills of the ghats in Tenkasi, Brahmadesam and Shankarankoil taluks. Tobacco gardens, iron furnaces and iron forges appear in 1823 Census returns only in these taluks, to indicate where trade in these items Table 1 . Tirunelveli Overland Trade Source: Tamil Nadu Archives, Proceedings of the Board of Revenue, 20 December 1838. India Office Records, 'Reports on the Internal and External Commerce of the Madras Presidency'. 19 Proceedings of the Board of Revenue (henceforth: PBR), Tamil Nadu Archives, v.352, 1805, pp. 4585-86. 110504 . originated. Similarly, the 123 oil mills in these four taluks would hav~ pressed much of the oil passing through district chowkeys, for red-soil farmers specialised in castor and gingelly cultivation .2" And the region included many of the most productive weaving centres in the district: all the 'Travancore cloth' exported in 1823 came from villages around Kallidaikurichi. 21 Local trade was taxed not in transit but at points of sale, cash accumulation and commodity production. The Collector wrote in 1802 that 'with the exception of the Talook of Srivilliputtur all the Lands Belonging to the Principle Pagodas in the Province were assumed by the Circar over fifty .years ago, and an allowance of money established for their support. '22 This arrangement continued until 1840.23 In 1836, principal temples received Rs. 3,98,979, about half from the treasury and the rest from the income of temple lands, equivalent to 15 per cent of total district revenue collections.'-4 Temples sent to the treasury bags of gold and silver and 'unopened hundi pots'." Local commercial activity was taxed, in part, through the separate category of moturpha taxes, 3 per cent of the total district revenue in 1823 2' but mostly in moturpha taxes that were combined with land revenue collections under the Company. More than a quarter of collections under the category of 'land revenue' came from miscellaneous village taxes, 21 assessed under headings listed in 1823 Census dehazada tables, for which well over half of all pattahs were issued in Fasli 1235. (Table 2) Villages were taxed on all variety of assets, not just on land, by any means. The 1823 Census list of 'headings from which revenue is derived' represents the most complete list of assets that comprise 'land revenue' as well as the elusive category of moturpha, described by one collector this way :21 It is difficult if not impossible to define the Moturpha tax in Tinnevelly. It varies without apparent cause in almost every village, both in the objects and rates of taxation .... Besides being a tax on the loom of the 20 See Ludden, Map 7. 21 Tamil Nadu Archives. Revenue Department Sundries No. 38, 'Geographical and Statis tical Memoir of Tiroanelveli and its Zamindaries', by Thomas Turnbull. 22 PBR, v.1511. 1836, p. 492. 23 TCR, v.7969, 1840, pp. 200-205. 24 PBR, v.1511, 1836, p. 492. 25 TCR, v.7967, 1837, p. 195; Stuart, Manual, p. 183. 26 Stuart, pp. 182-83. 27 In the 1820s, taxes on land were calculated separately from total village revenue, whereas in later decades village taxes of all kinds were added in to produce 'land revenue' figures. Revenue retrospectme statistics such as in Stuart (pp. 182-3) project later accounting proce dures backward into the 1820s. Comparing Stuart's figure of Rs. 19,68,106 for the F. 1235 land revenue with the figure of Rs. 13.89,780 for total land taxes in the Fasli 1235 jamabandy accounts (PBR, 17 October 1826, v.1089, pp. 638-753), it appears that Rs. 5,78,326 or 29 per cent of Stuart's total were village taxes not counted as land tax in 1826 accounts. 28 TCR, v.7969, 1840, pp. 104-19. 111505 weaver, the shop of the petty dealer, on the artisan and on the labourer gaining his livelihood by unskilled labour, it is a Poll tax, a house tax, a cattle stall and castle tax. The beggar is taxed ... while the Chuckler receives his Puttah ... for the enviable privilege of sharing with the wild beasts of the jungle the carcasses of the cattle that die within the limits of his village. z Table 2 Taxpayers in the Population: The Tinnevelly District Jamabandy for Fasfi 1235 (1824-25) Compared to 1823 Census Returns Source: Tamil Nadu Archives, Proceedings of the Board of Revenue, v. 1089, 1825. pp. 638-753; Revenue Department Sundry No. 39, 'Census and Dehazada of the Province of Tirunelvelie'. Taxes on looms, houses, and shops, roughly in proportion to their commercial value, provided most of the moturpha revenue that was accounted for separately. Ambasamudram weavers of high quality cloth (much of it for the Travancore market) paid about Rs. 7 per loom, more than twice the district average of Rs. 3.~ Weavers paid about 40 per cent of district moturpha revenue in 1842; house and shop taxes provided most of the rest, according to their value, profits, and the caste of their owners.31 29 TCR, v.7978, 1851, pp. 292-94; v.7972, 1844, pp. 198-204. 30 TCR, v.7970, 1842, pp. 57-74. TCR, v.7971, 1843, pp. 280-85, shows that 1,729 shops in towns were taxed at 5 rates, but 3,193 village shops at 2 rates. A more assessment classification applied to looms: A petition from Ambasamudram weavers in 1851 produced this schedule (TCR 7978, 1851, pp. 292-94) of taxation per loom: 112506 All village taxes were collected and transmitted through major landowners who were, in fact, revenue contractors well after 1823. In a minority of villages, 214 in the whole district by an 1837 count, these men were nattanmaikkaran, headmen with official titles; but ~in the rest of the villages there are no Nattamkars but only Mahajan Meerasidars who enjoy various emoluments'." These Mahajan mirasidars and headmen used their control of land, labour, and various commercial assets to accumulate the financial resources that enabled them to contract for village revenues. Mirasidars formed the local keystone of the revenue arch. They would collect the government melvaram grain and it was 'usual for the principal and most respected Meerasidars of each village to come forward as security for the rest [of the village revenue]'. 12 Thus financial transactions connecting villages to the state were much more complex than is suggested by imagery made famous by Company polemics of rapacious renters and officials extracting revenue from peasants. Imagining isolated, self-sufficient peasant villages was a polemical act, sensible in Company politics. But revenue came to the Nawab of Arcot and the Company from hamlets and villages that were subordinated to others and to towns, in hierarchies that marked channels for the flow of revenue; and revenue accumulation at each level presupposed speculative finance. Commerce connected hamlets, lesser villages, superior villages, and towns, to generate cash flows that states tapped in tribute and taxation. And revenue accumulation at points of transmission generated commercial capital to augment the social power of key people in the countryside. The revenue landscape in 1823 was a modified version of the one that supported Arcot Nawabs before 1801, when allied with Arcot, the Company could tap agrarian revenues only through powerful renters who commanded power, authority and capital in major towns. These subregional renters contracted with local renters-Mahajan mirasidars in major revenue villages-who contracted for revenue in turn from Mahajan mirasidars in subordinate villages and hamlets. Company officers penetrated the lower levels of revenue contracting slowly after 1801. Revenue contract operations changed slowly as coflectors began to negotiate contracts with village renters through native taluk officers on the Company payroll. In 1823, collectors and tahsildars had just begun to negotiate village revenue cons tracts on lines barely approximating Munro's ryotwari scheme." Within 31 PBR, v.1574, 1837, pp. 11451-71. 32 TCR, v.3596; 1819, pp. 107-10. 33 Ludden, pp. 107-15. 113507 revenue villages, a mirasidar's revenue authority financial assets, and landholdings enhanced one another, so that eighteenth century revenue organisation helped to produce the skewed 'rent rolls' that we see in later nineteenth century documents. ' Economic differentiation Beneath the revenue landscape, with its networks and centres of power, articulated by points of collection and transmission, lies a more complex and illusive landscape of agrarian commodity production. Its historical dynamism came from combinations of labour, technology, and financial assets moving on the land. But conceptually, the 1823 Census builds ideational walls that lock productive powers in units of state jurisdiction. This textual activity has a long history. Pre-colonial rulers knew the country as an array of points for revenue collection. At every point, settled agriculture and commodity trade generated revenue. Productive forces in motion posed political problems; the goal was to keep them at home. Landowners and learned Brahmans also wanted to keep labour and capital under control. They concentrated their minds~on the settled, permanent, routine, stable, morally unified workings of nature, society and agriculture. India's agricultural population may have become more sedentary as land use intensified over centuries before 1800. Sedentarisation was surely most intense and pervasive in the most intensively farmed, watered and revenue productive coastal regions where the Company gained its initial foothold and formalised oriental tradition. But considering the subcontinent as a whole for the half-millennium before 1800, it seems that productive forces developed in motion. Migration is thus critical in long-term development. In the Tirunelveli region, about forty-five per cent of the 1823 population had histories of migration into the region after 1300, described in caste lore." Mackenzie Manuscripts record hundreds of stories that depict migrations in south India. K.N. Chaudhuri quotes the Madras Council as complaining that in the 1740s 'weavers when disgusted leave lighted lamps in their houses and remove to some other part of the country, so that whole towns are deserted in a nights As people in motion energised the agrarian economy, rulers sought to harness human productive powers within territorial domains. The Company was only one among many rulers that defined agrarian order in its own terms, so as to set its agrarian power relations on a firm cognitive footing. It proceeded by dissecting a turbulent agrarian landscape into one of self- contained villages. These villages could then be assigned to central place hierarchies articulated by district administration. But the fully ramified 34 Ludden, pp. 25, 42-52. 35 The Trading World of Asia, pp. 252-53. 114508 central place hierarchy of Madras Presidency would come much later, when railway, census and industrial empire produced modern taxonomic distinctions among cities, towns and villages. Madras was still a Presidency town in 1823. The Company's headquarters, fort (Palayamkottai) and port (Tuticorin) were towns in 1823. Only Tenkasi and Shankarankoil are listed as towns in 1823 Census rettims for our sample region. The Company's taxonomy knew only the village as a natural sight for Indian agrarian society and discriminated only types of revenue villages, by jurisdiction and local revenue privilege.. A Tamil taxonomy did use terms that have been translated to mean rural and urban settlements, but this dichotomy is itself a modern concoction. Tamil terms never implied urban-rural differentiation or central place hierarchy of a modern sort. Today, we want to describe places as urban and rural. But the eighteenth century Tamil taxonomy did not: it made qualitatively different distinctions among places. One set of place name endings that translate as 'village' connotes well-established agrarian settlements (-ur, -puram). Other endings suggest marginal, isolated hamlets (-kurichi, -patti), new settlements (-pudur)', and commercial centres (-patianam). Another set connotes Brahman and/or temple endowments (-agraharam, -devasthanam, -kovil, -mangalam, -samudram, -sattiram). Some endings refei to landmarks, commonly forts (-kottai) and irrigation tanks (-eri, -kulam); and others to landmark events, often royal residence or refuge (-iruppu, -valasai). Such distinctions among settlements were politically and economically salient as local taxonomic markers, but they did not categorise places in a regional central place order. We are left with the village landscape of Company Raj. But the 1823 Census gives enough detail and the character of our 159 sample Census villages is sufficiently transparent to reveal local workings of economy in the long eighteenth century. Clearly Census 'villages' are survivals of eighteenth century revenue jurisdictions. Some appear by name in Company correspondence concerning revenue renting and transactions with Poligars and Travancore rajas,36 The most substantial of old local domains remain as the largest 1823 Census and Revenue villages, most including many subordinate villages. Excepting two distinctive towns, Tenkasi and Shankarankoil, Census villages with more than 2,000 people are agglomerations : each principal village has many subordinate villages, many more than ten, most more than five, one forty-three, and one forty-five. Theses major prizes in revenue struggles before 1801 resemble extended local domains that rich landowners built during medieval times.3' Major mirasidars in principal villages with many subordinate villages had substantial local domains indeed. Smaller domains, centred on principal villages, fill 36 K. Rajayyan, History of Madurai (1736-1801), Madurai, 1974, pp. 132, 176. 37 Ludden, pp. 34-40. 115509 the rest of the landscape, except for a set of 62 very small villages: some of these are artisan and commercial suburbs, jurisdictional fragments in the complex spatial division of labour of riverine tracts; but many are isolated settlements scattered across the dry plains. A very skewed village distribution of population and farmland results. (See Table 3) Fifty-nine huge villages (Groups I and II), with an average population of 2,122, comprise 37 per cent of sample villages but contain 76 per cent of the population and 71 per cent of the farmland.38 At the other extreme, 62 tiny villages (Groups IV and V), with 194 people on average, comprise 39 per cent of villages with only 7 per cent of the total population and 9 per cent of the farmland. Calculating population per total farm acreage inscribes a slight gradient across the five size groups from 0.33 for Group I to 0.22 for Group 5, but big villages dominate the sample average of 0.30. Census villages are eighteenth century political constructs, so that their size and agglomeration of settlements represent local revenue domains. The 1823 Census does not give data separately for principal or subordinate villages, let alone for constituent hamlets. But data for Census villages does indicate the economic character of their components. Size groups embrace villages of diverse economic types. We find in Groups I and V similar villages with very high (1.50) and very low (0.21) numbers of people per farm acre. Group I contains villages with many taxed artisan assets and others with none. Group V contains isolated farming hamlets and artisan suburbs. Low densities per farm acre across size groups suggest what indexes of economic characteristics reveal: large village populations in the 1823 Census do not indicate densely populated, economically differentiated, urban areas. Conversely, some tiny villages contain very high proportions of manufacturing and commercial assets. Size group averages for two indexes of non-agricultural economic activity appear in Table 3. One index (A) is broad: it measures the degree to which forty-three dehazada items and total population are concentrated in each census village compared to farm acreage.39 The other is narrow: it measures the concentration of twenty-two types of taxed artisan and commercial assets compared to total population. [See Appendix] A village index value of 1.00 for a Census data item means that the village percentage of the sample total for that item is the same as the village percentage of total 38 Total farmland is all nunjah and punjah. Nanjah and punjah land are broken into three categories in the 1823 Census and contemporary Revenue accounts: arable, tarsi, and waste, which correspond roughly to farmed, current uncultivated (short fallow), and long-unculti vated (including long fallow and uncultivable land). But these are Revenue and not land-use categories. 39 The 43 items marked '(A)' in the Appendix represent a set that we would expect to be more concentrated in proportion to farmland in urban environments. For comparability, I have employed the same method for computing concentration here as in Ludden, p. 225, n. 18. 116510 I 1 i« li ~H a V E m .V °% I't;- D ts :=1 12 ~4 I ~ I . 1 91 [ b Q o' b a C~6 ~ p .4: s .£ Z .N e~ w 2 C ~ ~ i ~ ~ eo .:., r ~a ~ z 117511 farmland (Index A) or total population (Index B). For each village, the simple average of index item values yields a non-agricultural activity index. High index values, well above the sample average, indicate that a census village contains a high proportion of artisan and/or commercial activity. For simplicity, we can say that this means it is more urban in its economic character. Low index values for a village render it more rural: this means in practice that it contained few taxable assets other than land counted in the 1823 Census. Table 3 shows that in general smaller census villages-that is, smaller eighteenth century local revenue domains~tend to be slightly more urban as measured by these indexes. Huge villages (Groups I and II) average lower than the sample average for indexes A (0.94) and B (0.76); small villages (Groups IV and V) average slightly higher (A = 1.05; B = 1.38). The explanation lies in politics. Mirasidars in subordinate villages had incentives to work themselves free from superiors in principal villages. When they had commercial assets for the purpose, they apparently petitioned to be recognised as leaders of a separate revenue village. Echoes of medieval politics can be heard here. Many inscriptions from the Chola period concern disputes and petitions of this kind, directed at temple authorities. Mirasidars seem in general to have sought revenue and financial autonomy as their local economy developed. Ambasamudram had sixteen ur in 1477. Many of these were major villages in their own right by 1823, when Ambasamudram (population: 3,952) was a major urban place with but three subordinate villages."' Similarly, many tiny and relatively isolated villages in foothills and plains may have been breakaway settlements in which farmers claimed highly productive land and upstream irrigation waters. Thus though in the dry plains tiny villages were often very poorly endowed with taxed assets other than land, some of the smallest census villages had high concentrations of looms, mat frames, gunny frames, toddy shops, arrack shops, and other commercial assets, in addition to artisan and merchant castes. We can see economic differentiation in the village landscape by combining population size with the broad urban index (A). Doing so, we can divide very populous Census villages into two types (See Table 4). Type 1 census villages are in economic terms more urban complexes than villages, whereas Type 2 Census villages are revenue agglomerations of rural settlements villages with few taxed non-agricultural assets in proportion to farmland. Midsize Census villages (the sample average population is 1,044) divide in the same way (Types 3 and 4). I have divided small villages into three types, to illustrate possibilities for further division on these lines. Type 5 villages are specialised settlements of artisans and retailers, mostly in the suburbs of Type 1 urban centres. Type 6 villages, small in size and 40 Ludden, pp. 38-9, 228, n. 66. 118512 Table 4 1823 Tirunelveli Census Villages: Economic Types in Four Sample Taluks (Percentages are of Sample Totals) Note: Taluks are Tenkasi, Shankarankoil (minus Zamindaris), Brahmadesam and Shermadevi. For Index A definition, see note 39 and Appendix. Source: Tamil Nadu Archives, Revenue Department Sundries No. 39, 'Census and Dehazada of the Province of Tirunelvelie'. number, balance urban and rural characteristics and approximate the sample average for Index A (2.11). Type 7 villages most resemble conventional images: they are small and least complicated by commerce and multi-village revenue hierarchies (though averaging two subordinate villages each). Table 5 reorganises data from Table 4 to highlight the urban-rural gradient. It shows that a quarter of the sample population lived in Census villages with relatively high proportions of non-agricultural assets: in urban centres, towns and suburbs. If we omit all these more urban areas from the sample, we still see a gradient from higher to lower village concentrations of non-agricultural assets among the remaining 115 Census villages. The resulting picture is thus not one of sharp disjuncture between urban and rural locations, but rather of a gradual slope from higher to lower index values, from more urban to more rural Census villages, with some extreme cases at both ends. From such calculations, we begin to see the agrarian landscape that provided revenue for states during the eighteenth century. It is a patchwork of specialisation, filled with small, medium, and large concentrations of population, commercial activity, and artisan production, centres of revenue transactions connected by roads and pathways. Roads are bad by modern standards, but very easy to make, and except for long-haul traffic through major centres, free to use, so that new centres of economic specialisation can pop up anywhere local resources allow, without being seriously disadvantaged by transport costs in the inter-village marketing system. Transport costs are very high, and units of commodity transport are very small, 119513 Table 5 ' The Urban-Rural Gradient in Tirunelveli: Four Taluks in 1823 (Percentages are of Sample Total) Note: Taluks are Tenkasi, Shankarankoil (minus Zamindaris), Brahmadesam, and Shermadevi. For Index A definition, see note 39 and Appendix. For definition of 'farmland,' see note 38. Source: Tamil Nadu Archives, Revenue Department Sundries No. 39, 'Census and Dehazada of the Province of Tirunelvelie'. but local specialisation generates a constant flow of small commodity loads from village to village up and down the gradient from more agricultural to more non-agricultural locations. Major urban areas produce for long-distance trade and are just about the only places producers for that trade- silk and fine cloth weavers-are found. Major urban areas are also centres of government, but like smaller urban centres they draw their raw materials~otton, dyes, oil, toddy, iron, wood, brick, stone, lime, tobacco-as well as food, labour, animals, and revenue finance, from surrounding rural areas to which they are connected not only by trade and labour flows but by extended class relations defined in part by state revenue hierarchies. Commodities produced in small batches, moving in small batches~n human heads, on bullock backs, and in carts-and sold in small batches, generated many small accumulations of commercial capital and a few fortunes in big urban centres. State revenue came from this landscape of commodity production, labour specialisation, and economic differentiation. Conclusion . If there is a disjuncture between histories of states and of agricultural communities in pre-modern India, it is not the one we see in ryotwari polemics, oriental despotism, Asiatic mode of production or other formulations that depict India's pre-colonial states as only extractive machines penetrating self-sufficient farming villages ,to take surpluses that feed both 120514 empires and commercial capitalism. It is rather a disjuncture created by scholars who have built theory on the textual representations of agrarian society found in the polemics of Company Raj. As a result, the agrarian history of India remains trapped in the terms and logic of formal state revenue representations of the countryside, which only imagine the agrarian world in subordination to state power. The long eighteenth century is so important for agrarian history because here we see contests between pre-colonial and colonial order, such as Company struggles to subdue renters; but also because contest dismpted routines of subordination and representation, creating new ones that can enrich the historical imagination. Until very recently, scholars fixed their minds on a small set of these new representations and theorised a pre-colonial landscape of undifferentiated, stable, self-reproducing, village communities. But Company polemics that began this line of theorising are empirically only the tip of the iceberg. If we look below, we find piles of records with which to imagine and theorise another kind of agrarian history, to better understand ties that bound late pre-colonial and early colonial states alike to their agrarian base. Company officers documented a complex, changing, and highly differentiated landscape of agrarian commodity production in south India. They did not see it as a whole, only in pieces. What they portrayed to Parliament was a landscape simplified for polemical purposes, a landscape of rhetoric drawn to solve political problems. But pursuing power inside agrarian south India, they produced an array of descriptive representations, more detailed than any before and most since. In these texts we can see the interactions among state powers and local commodity producers who created and appropriated commercial capital in the agrarian political economy. In Tirunelveli, as throughout the semi-arid peninsula, limits on growth posed by water supplies are critical in this interaction. Output per acre and thus the magnitude and constancy of food supplies and the availability of surpluses for non-agricultural uses were a function of water supplies. Not a linear function: too much water is a problem; soil quality, strategic location, and other natural assets like minerals, forests, and fisheries warp the curve that describes the relation between water supply and agrarian wealth. But water was always a limiting factor in growth----demographic and economic- in any location. And water supplies were a function not only of nature, but also of political power and technology. Political power could capture drainage, invest state revenues in technologies to make water productive, and thus create environments more attractive for private investment of all kinds, to produce locations for demographic and economic expansion. Power, revenue, water control, investment, and of course, demographic expansion all hinged on labour mobility, thus on decisions by workers to 121515 move into employment or subsistence settings that they judged to be superior, to stay there long enough to render those settings more attractive for future immigrants, and to raise the families that would be engines of further growth. Obviously, labour moving into centres of growing political power gen = _ erated growth. Policies to attract and keep workers are well enough documented for pre-modern India to indicate that rulers and thinkers were generally aware of this fact. The political economy of labour and water lay foundations for state revenue and explains much of the spatial differentiation that we see in Tirunelveli for the first time clearly in Turnbull's Census. Urban areas in Table 5 had on average 3.54 times more cultivated wet land (nanjah) than they did total farmland; small towns had 3.18 times as much; and differentiation among rural areas is likewise founded on the range -of ratios running from 2.42 down to 0.04. Cultivated land under wells was not included in the nanjah classification and would have further differentiated villages, particularly in dry-farming rural areas where no other irrigation for commercially valuable garden crops like sugar, tobacco, chillies and vegetables was available. Dry grains like oil seeds and cotton were commercially important, and deposits of iron and woodland were commercial assets for dry-farming villagers, but their markets were more urban settlements nearby whose buying power depended on superior water supplies from drainage irrigation. In Tamil and Company lexicons alike, wet land is rice land, although farmers grew many crops on irrigated fields. Husked and unhusked rice were symbolically (in temple and household rituals) and economically (for farms, villages and states) the commodities around which others gathered. The symbolic and market value of rice made the temporal and spatial pattern of paddy production that of the entire economy. Localised commercialism around temples and brahmadeyas in medieval centuries seems to have rested entirely on small-scale irrigation in strategic riverine areas in Tirunelveli. Four of the six large urban centres in our sample developed from this foundation. And over the centuries, irrigated agriculture would never be superseded in importance for state revenue or commercial capital. A good paddy crop would raise demand for labour and lower the money value of grain wages labour not only for crop production but for irrigation work, storage, hauling, milling, and marketing rice. It would provide stores for sales over the year, locally and in all the nearby places with less good crops. The narrow river valleys, patchiness of natural drainage supplies, and small scale of all irrigation systems produced populations of buyers and sellers in very close proximity to one another, and they would change roles with the season. Two seasons brought water down rivers from the ghats; and some villages could produce a good winter crop but none in 122516 spring. The most prized land would produce two crops. These areas were thus prime locations for investments in irrigation made in anticipation of constant, ample crops and secure commercial returns. Thus urban areas grew in proportion to water, paddy, and labour supplies. Service groups, artisans, merchants, and workers of all kinds sought employment where investments in irrigation poured water onto the land. Urban buyers for rural products generated demand for rural products and labour. Urban financiers collected and transmitted government revenue to enhance portfolios that included land holdings, grain stocks, temple endowments, and an array of other assets that increased over time. Government revenue rested on networks of power that spread out from urban centres, large and small. Some sixty per cent of the revenue came directly from taxes on irrigated land in the Tirunelveli region, some collected in cash from speculators that in return received the melvaram grain for retail sales over the coming months, and the rest collected by government in grain for sale in its own granaries. Revenues from temples, customs and sundry moturpha taxes came directly from or passed through the hands of commercially active locals in these urban centres of the agrarian economy. The revenue assets that stayed in their hands they could reinvest in agriculture, in wider commercial. activity. and revenue contracting, and thus in building the financial base of the early-modern state.. . APPENDIX Standard Dehazada Items in 1823 Census Tables village number village name Jamabandy number I. Villages Mouza or Principal Inhabited Murza or Subordinate Ruined/Uninhabited Joomlah or Total 123517 . II. Vil>age E8t8bH1hment Principal Mirasidars Subordinate Mirasidars III. Water Wocts _ Anicuts Aqueducts or Sluices on Tanks Canals Kalingula Sluices Kalodai or jungle streams Bridges Teppa Kulam Outlets & Floodgates Oorney or Pond Agapattu Kulam Wells Built of Stone (A) . Manavary Kulam Common Wells (A) Yaindel (Lesser Tanks) Ruined Wells Ruined Tanks Total Water Works IV. Religious Institutions A. HINDOO TEMPLES Principal Subrahmaniyar Shiven Vigneshuvarar Vishnu Miscellaneous B. RELIGIOUS FOUNDATIONS Mandapams C. MOHAMMADAN Masjid Pullyvassal Fakeer Takkal E. INFERIOR Amman and Pedaury koils Puller and Pariah Places of Worship Peycoils Total of Religious Buildings (A) Elevar or Shanar Koils V. Public Buildings Taluk Kutchery Accountant Choultry Chowkey or Town Custom Granaries ' Vulchary or Road Custom Total Public Buildings VI. Charitable Foundations Chattram Water Pandel Choultry VII. Schools 'Tamil School Gentoo Sanskrit School VIII. Heads From Whence Revenue Is Derived . A. FAIRS AND FESTIVALS . Annual Car Festival and Fair (A) Periodic Festival and Banquet (A) B. COMMERCE AND MANUFACTURE Arrack Shops (A) (B) Gunny Frames (A) (B) Toddy Shops (A) (B) Mat Frames (A) (B) Bazaars (A) (B) Oil Mills (A) (B) Beetle Bazaars (A) (B) Sugar Mills (A) (B) 124518 (Contd. ) Patnulkar Looms (+) (A) (B) Lime Kilns (A) (B) Pattachalien Looms (+) (A) (B) Carpenter's Yard (A) (B) Kaikkolar Looms (A) (B) Potter's Works (A) (B) Moormen Looms (A) (B) Barber's Razor Cases (A) (B) Elaver and Shanar Looms (A) (B) Silversmith's Shop (A) (B) Kollar and Puller Looms (+) (A) (B) Brazier's Shop (A) (B) , Pullers and Pariahs Looms (+) (A) (B) Artist's Shop (A) (B) Total Number of Looms (A) (B) Washerman Bleaching Places (A) (B) Carts (A) (B) VIII. Streets Car Streets Streets Lanes IX. Houses A. DESCRIPTION Houses of Two Stories (A) Terraced Houses (A) Thatched Roof Houses Tile Roof Houses (A) Terraced Houses B. INHABITANTS . Husbandmen Village Accountants Merchants and Traders Professional Men Native Public Servants Free Inhabitants Kavalkaran/Watchmen . Predial Slaves (Puller & Pariah) ' Meerasidar/Landholders Total Houses ' X. Implements: Ploughs (A) XI. Bulls and Buffaloes Oxen or Bullocks (A) Cows (A) Buffaloes (A) XII. Domesticated Animals _ ' Sheep (A) Asses (A) Goats (A) Horses (A) XIII. Heads from Whence Revenue is Derived A. NANJAH OR PADDY LAND Nanjah Arable (Kottais) Nanjah Tarsi (Kottais) . Nanjah Waste (Kottais) Total Nanjah (Kottais) . B. PUNJAH OR DRY LAND Punjah Arable (Chains) , . _ Punjah Tarsi (Chains) ' Punjah Waste (Chains) Total Punjah (Chains) C. GARDENS Betel Gardens Sugar Cane Gardens 125519 D. TREES Coconut Trees (A) Productive Palmyras Supari Nut Trees (A) Young/unproductive Palmyras Jackfruit Trees (A) Total Number of Trees Mango Trees (+) (A) Mundiary/Exempt from Tax Tamarind Trees (+) (A) Trees Liable to Tax Miscellaneous Trees (A) XIV. Immunities or Maniyams and Kavil Rights XV. The Nature of the Country Jungles Passes Hills 1 The politics of Thomas Munro's presentations to Parliament are detailed in Burton Stein's biography of Munro (forthcoming, Cambridge' University Press). For documents, see Walter Kelty Firminger, ed., Affairs of the East India Company (Being the Fifth Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons 28th July, 1812), Delhi, 1984. 2 Avineri, Shlomo, ed., Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization, Garden City, 1969. 3 Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India 1556-1707, Bombay, 1963. 4 Bartington Moore, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in Making the Modern World, Boston, 1966; Eric L. Jones, The European Miracle: Environ ments, Economies, and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia, Cambridge, 1981; Immanuel Wallerstein, 'The Incorporation of the Indian Subcontinent into the Capitalist World-Economy', The Economic and Political Weekly, 21, 4, Review of Political Economy, January 25, PE28-PE39; and Ravi Palat, Kenneth Barr, James Matson, Vinay Bahl and Nesar Ahmad, 'The Incorporation and Peripheralization of South Asia, 1600-1950', Review, 10, 1, Summer 1986, pp. 171-208. 5 Irfan Habib, 'Classifying Pre-Colonial India,' in T.J. Byres and Harbans Mukhia ed., Feudalism and Non-European Societies, London, 1985, p. 48. 6 K.N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company. 1660-1760, Cambridge, 1978. Om Prakash, The Dutch East India Company and the Economy of Bengal, 1630-1720, Princeton, 1985. Tapan Raychaudhuri, 'Non-Agricultural Production: Mughal India,' and 'Inland Trade', in Tapan Raychaudhuri and Irfan Habih. cd. The Cambridge Economic History of India. Volume I: 1200-c.1750, Cambridge, 1983, pp. 261-307, 325-360. A.I. Chicherov, Indian Economic Development in the 16th-18th Centuries: An Outline History of Crafts and Trade, Moscow, 1971. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, 'Trade and the Regional Economy of South India, c.1550-1650,' Delhi School of Economics disscrtation, 1987. John F. Richards, The Imperial Monetary System of Mughal India, Oxford, 1987. Frank Perlin, 'Of White Whale and Countrymen in the Eighteenth Century Maratha Deccan: Extended Class Relations, Rights, and the Problem of Rural Autonomy under the Old Regime,' Journal of Peasant Studies, 5, 2, 1978. pp. 172-237. Christopher A. Bayley. Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770-1870, Cambridge, 1983. David Ludden, Peasant History in South India, Princeton, 1985. 7 Tamil Nadu Archives, Revenue Department Sundries No. 39. 'Census and Dchazada of the Province of Tirunelvelie' (henceforth: 1823 Census). For its origins, see R.H. Phillimore, Historical Records of the Survey of India, Dehra Dun, 1954-1956. v.III, pp. 166-67. For context, see Census of India 1961, Report on the Population Estimates of India (1820-1830), edited by Durgaprasad and Bibhavati Bhattacharya, New Delhi, 1963. 8 All statistics are available from the author. 9 Tamil Nadu Archives, Tinnevelly Collectorate Records (henceforth: TCR), v.7972, 1844, pp. 198-204. 10 Dharma Kumar, ed. , The Cambridge Economic History of India, Volume 2, c. 1757- c. 1970. Cambridge, 1983, pp. 55, 90, 103ff; Ludden, Peasant History, pp. 116-17. 11 TCR, v.7972, 1844, pp. 198-204. 12 A.J. Stuart, A Manual of the Tinnevelly District, Madras, 1876, Appendix 10. 13 TCR, v.3600, 1805, p. 51. 14 TCR, v.7975, 1846, p. 69. 15 Ludden, pp. 135-55. 16 TCR, v.3599, 1804, pp. 14-23, 45-51. 17 TCR, v.3587, 1807, pp. 120-25, v.3582, 1807, pp. 267-69. 18 See Ludden. pp. 81-96, 269-70. 19 Proceedings of the Board of Revenue (henceforth: PBR), Tamil Nadu Archives, v.352, 1805, pp. 4585-86. 20 See Ludden, Map 7. 21 Tamil Nadu Archives. Revenue Department Sundries No. 38, 'Geographical and Statis tical Memoir of Tiroanelveli and its Zamindaries', by Thomas Turnbull. 22 PBR, v.1511. 1836, p. 492. 23 TCR, v.7969, 1840, pp. 200-205. 24 PBR, v.1511, 1836, p. 492. 25 TCR, v.7967, 1837, p. 195; Stuart, Manual, p. 183. 26 Stuart, pp. 182-83. 27 In the 1820s, taxes on land were calculated separately from total village revenue, whereas in later decades village taxes of all kinds were added in to produce 'land revenue' figures. Revenue retrospectme statistics such as in Stuart (pp. 182-3) project later accounting proce dures backward into the 1820s. Comparing Stuart's figure of Rs. 19,68,106 for the F. 1235 land revenue with the figure of Rs. 13.89,780 for total land taxes in the Fasli 1235 jamabandy accounts (PBR, 17 October 1826, v.1089, pp. 638-753), it appears that Rs. 5,78,326 or 29 per cent of Stuart's total were village taxes not counted as land tax in 1826 accounts. 28 TCR, v.7969, 1840, pp. 104-19. 29 TCR, v.7978, 1851, pp. 292-94; v.7972, 1844, pp. 198-204. 30 TCR, v.7970, 1842, pp. 57-74. TCR, v.7971, 1843, pp. 280-85, shows that 1,729 shops in towns were taxed at 5 rates, but 3,193 village shops at 2 rates. A more assessment classification applied to looms: A petition from Ambasamudram weavers in 1851 produced this schedule (TCR 7978, 1851, pp. 292-94) of taxation per loom: 31 PBR, v.1574, 1837, pp. 11451-71. 32 TCR, v.3596; 1819, pp. 107-10. 33 Ludden, pp. 107-15. 34 Ludden, pp. 25, 42-52. 35 The Trading World of Asia, pp. 252-53. 36 K. Rajayyan, History of Madurai (1736-1801), Madurai, 1974, pp. 132, 176. 37 Ludden, pp. 34-40. 38 Total farmland is all nunjah and punjah. Nanjah and punjah land are broken into three categories in the 1823 Census and contemporary Revenue accounts: arable, tarsi, and waste, which correspond roughly to farmed, current uncultivated (short fallow), and long-unculti vated (including long fallow and uncultivable land). But these are Revenue and not land-use categories. 39 The 43 items marked '(A)' in the Appendix represent a set that we would expect to be more concentrated in proportion to farmland in urban environments. For comparability, I have employed the same method for computing concentration here as in Ludden, p. 225, n. 18. 40 Ludden, pp. 38-9, 228, n. 66.

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