On the Historiographical and Historical Displacement of Land

Abstract Standard accounts of South Asian developmentalism render invisible the very conditions that make it possible: the successive displacement of land, both historiographically and historically. The author argues that by the late nineteenth century, there was a critical shift in the epistemological paradigm through which colonial political economy viewed the potential for agrarian development. It was not land, but the intimate, personal, and laboring capacities of the peasant proprietor that was the real object of “improvement” in the grammar of development. The author points toward how credit was the financial logic through which “development” was sought to be put to work in service of maintaining an embattled Britain's hegemonic grip over imperially organized global capital. Indeed, the author's claim about land in this piece is part of a larger set of claims about the epistemological orientation of the late nineteenth-century colonial state. There is a history to be excavated between the structural conditions through which South Asia related as a financial project for Britain and its stewardship of the global economy: between the appearance that political problems took in policy and the epistemological coordinates of political economy in the calculus of governance.