Market Integration through Peasantisation: the Economic Transformation of

Africa, the Caribbean and India under Modern Colonialism

Ralph A. Austen
University of Chicago

[This paper is very much a work in progress, not only in relation to the larger project which
is described below but also in its own narrower terrain. I hope that it will read and
discussed on these terms, particularly with regard to my still tentative ventures into
Caribbean and South Asian historiography. The last section is particularly shaky although,
in the interest of readability, I have written it in a style which implies more confidence than I
actually feel]

During the period extending from the latter eighteenth to the late nineteenth century,

first India, then the British and French Caribbean and finally tropical Africa underwent both

political and economic transformations. The political change was one from what I will call

proto-colonialism to formal colonialism. The economic transformation included both a

greater integration into a European-dominated global market system and a shift towards

greater reliance on peasant agriculture as the main, or a major, base for government

revenues and export production.

There is clearly something paradoxical about the conjuncture of these processes.

Formal colonialism and market integration brought these regions into closer contact with

the industrial North Atlantic world but peasant economies seem more out of step with this

world than even the export economic systems which preceded them in each of the

colonized regions.

The “mode of production” paradox which will be pursued in the present paper is part

of a larger project I am pursuing on the “road to postcoloniality” of Africa, India and the

Caribbean. The basic narrative argues that these three regions were critical to European

(and thus “global”) economic development in the early modern/pre-industrial seventeenth

 2
and eighteenth centuries, that they became marginal to this economy in the modern long

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and that the economic, political and cultural effect

of formal colonialism placed them in a unique postcolonial situation during the late

twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

There are two controversial assumptions in this paper. The first, its assertion of

such a strong role for tropical overseas enterprises in the early modern European

economy, but that is an issue which can only be approached indirectly here.1 The second,

an equation of peasant-based market production with marginalisation, needs some further

preliminary discussion. The intent here is certainly not to equate peasant cultivation with

irrationality or even inefficiency in some absolute sense. As will be seen below, many

scholars, particularly in African and Caribbean studies, have treated peasants as heroic

entrepreneurs, struggling against market interferences imposed in the name of politically

more influential European estate agriculture. I am convinced that the rationalism of

peasant farming, which has some linkages with subsistence, often emphasizes risk

avoidance more than profit maximization (Brcyeson 200:25-26; Stone” 102-04). However,

as many western development schemes have indicated, this may often be the only

rationality which works in tropical situations. In any case, an economy based upon

peasantries does tend to exhibit wide gaps between its commanding heights and

productive base, usually bridged by patron-client networks rather than debates over

collective developmental interests. This is one of the key conditions of underdevelopment,

1
It is addressed to some extent in Austen and Smith 1990/92 and in a planned
article with Smith. For India there is also a lengthy discussion in Austen 2001.
 3
both internally and in the position of such economies within a globally integrated system. It

is not necessarily an insuperable condition, as some of the case studies will suggest. This

study is not, however, intended as a prescription for development but rather as a map of

the road to its current dilemmas.

The paper is also very derivative from the work of others. Its only claim to originality

is the assertion of a common process in three such different regions of the world.

Peasantisation certainly did not follow identical paths in Africa, the Caribbean and India but

the degree of shared experience and, in particular, its relationship to formal colonial

regimes provides one of the key elements in the argument for an identifiable movement

towards a similar postcolonial condition.

1. Peasants and Proto-Colonial Regimes

The European presence in Africa2, the Caribbean and India during the eighteenth

century was both more economic and less colonial than in the period of peasantisation.

The economic nature of these overseas projects is quite obvious, since the representatives

of Europe consisted almost entirely of merchants and planters. Merchants went to Africa

and India to trade for commodities not available in the metropole and sufficiently valuable

to support lengthy and often dangerous voyages. The principal export from Africa during

his period was slaves, who were sold mainly to Caribbean plantations, which in turn

produced sugar, a much-sought consumer item in Europe. By most definitions the

European trading settlements on the coasts of Africa and India would not be considered

2
Unless otherwise specified, references to “Africa” cover only the tropic portions of
the continent, as opposed to both the Maghreb and South Africa, where colonialism took
the form of European settlement rather than peasant regimes.
 4
colonies but that is not true for the West Indian island territories of Britain and France.3

However, one component which all these “factories and plantations” (in the terminology of

the time) lacked is what later came to be understood as colonial subjects i.e. non-

European populations placed under the political authority of European bureaucrats. The

African and Indian commercial posts contained some indigenous inhabitants (tens of

thousands in the Indian case) but they were very loosely integrated into the very limited

local government provided by Europeans. The Carribean had much larger European

populations who (even in the French islands) should be considered citizens, exercising

considerable rights of self-government, along with some “free people of color,” but the main

population consisted of slaves who had the legal status of chattel rather than full human

subjects. Colonial subjects would only emerge once Europeans extended their territorial

control in Africa and India and the majority of the Caribbean population became legally free

but politically unenfranchised.

Peasants are a presence in these proto-colonial situations but a very secondary

one, at least in regard to the European-oriented export economy. This is probably the

place to insert a brief definition of what is meant here by peasants. Much ink has been

spilled in this topic but I will use a fairly simple economic definition, following Daniel

Thorner (1971; see also Bryceson 2000:2 f.): peasants are smallholder agriculturalists,

producing a mixture of market and subsistence/provisioning crops, using a significant

3
I am omitting Iberian colonies from this analysis because they follow a very different
historical path than those of the North Atlantic European states but the case of the
Netherlands, in both the Caribbean in Indonesia may need to be considered in the final
version of the project. The patterns here are also different than those of France and Britain
but for reasons which it would be useful to examine. (e.g. Drescher 1996).
 5
portion of household labor and communal social capital, secure in their land tenancy

(whatever its legal basis) and operating within the compass of a more powerful urbanized

socio-political order. Greater refinements of the boundaries between peasant and

capitalist agriculture (in which land and labor are fully commoditised and far greater capital

inputs are employed) will be discussed in relationship to specific situations.

The pre-emancipation Caribbean plantation is an almost perfect case of a capitalist

agricultural system since here labor itself is replaced by “human capital.” 4 It is also

provides a good example of a peripheral peasantry or what Sidney Mintz (1974:151-2)

has labeled a “proto-peasantry,” based upon the provisioning grounds where slaves

produced part of their own diet along with agricultural goods which could be sold in local

“Sunday markets.” While the provisioning grounds may have been a necessary support, in

both material and social terms, of the plantation system they did not provide the export

commodities (mainly sugar and coffee) which were the raison d’etre of the entire

enterprise.

Farmers in precolonial also Africa meet the economic definition of peasants.5 Most

agricultural regions participated in markets of some kind and many recognized the

suzerainty of urbanized states. However, tribute to these states appears to have consisted

almost entirely of produce, so that state domination and the market were not closely

4
“capital”, “chattel” and “cattle” all have the same etymology.
5
Fallers (1961) makes the valid point that precolonial Africans lacked the cultural
consciousness characterizing peasants in Europe and Asia. This remains an issue for the
comparative understanding of colonial peasantries, as seen below; I also hope to treat it
(and the more obviously missing issue of “peasant resistence”) elsewhere under the rubric
of anti/post-colonial nationalism.
 6
integrated and rarely linked to external trade. Peasants participated in the Atlantic slave

trade (as well as commerce in other “foraged” exports such as ivory or tropical hardwoods)

only as provisioners, and even here (as with West African Sudanic states), many of the

food supplies were produced by purchased slaves transformed into a servile peasantry.

The lengthy (up to three-quarters of a century) period of “legitimate trade” which intervened

between slave trade abolition in West Africa and colonialism did focus on exports of goods

produced by peasants, particularly palm oil or kernels and peanuts, but the palm products

were still semi-foraged rather than cultivated and both they and peanuts were frequently

supplied by enslaved labor (Law 1993).

Peasants did constitute the main revenue base of the regimes preceding British

rule in India: the Mughal empire and its indigenous successor states. A large part,

although by no means all, of such taxes were paid in cash, so that peasants were forced

into extensive market participation. However the main exports which interested

Europeans, cotton textiles, were produced by weavers who were not, as was often the

case in Europe of that time, simultaneously peasants (Parthasarathi 2001). Weavers

depended upon peasants for the raw material of their industry and all participants in

overseas trade drew upon local cultivators for their provisions, but the trade itself and even

the main tax revenue of the three British East India Company “Presidencies” (Austen 2001)

was not peasant-based.

2. The Reluctant Move to Peasantisation

It is not only historians looking at modern colonialism in retrospect who have been

struck by the incongruity between its external linkages to industrialism and its internal basis
 7
in peasant agriculture. The authorities responsible for shaping these new territorial entities

uniformly sought to maintain or create some other economic base and only accepted the

peasant solution late and with some reluctance. To understand this economic transition it

is first necessary to consider the political circumstances which required such adjustments.

To place politics before economics as the context for the “new colonialism” of (in the

chronological order) India, the Caribbean and Africa is, of course, to enter another realm of

controversy, and again one which cannot be detailed here.6 Broadly speaking, the

premise of the present argument is that the economic projects of early-modern proto-

colonialism created the circumstances for modern “true” colonialism but it was political

factors which brought about the shift from one form to the other. In the case of India, these

forces were a combination of Anglo-French world warfare and struggles among Mughal

successor states; in the Caribbean it was an ideological attack on slavery at a time when

this form of plantation agriculture was still flourishing; in Africa the driving force for

colonization was the European Great Power rivalry which followed the unification of

Germany.

The political form imposed upon these new/transformed territories was that of a

more-or-less despotic regime of professional colonial bureaucrats. In India (the model for

the others) and Africa this form was adopted very early, although it did have to replace

6
The supposedly “Marxist” thesis about the Partition of Africa has long been laid to
rest (Austen 1987:116-7); for the Caribbean, the “Williams Thesis” (which inspires the
larger project here concerning early modern overseas expansion and European
development) is most difficult to defend as an explanation for the motivations of abolition
(Blackburn); the case of India remains the least resolved although I have tried to deal with it
in Austen 2001.
 8
initial (and uniformly unsuccessful) experiments with private commercial firms as governing

bodies.7 In the case of the British Caribbean, planter-based government was maintained

for more than three decades after the 1834 abolition of slavery but finally, in the face of

conflicts over peasant demands for land, an Indian-style Crown Colony system was

imposed on most of the British islands. The French emancipated their West Indian slaves

only in 1848 but during the ensuing metropolitan dictatorship and Second Empire of Louis

Napoleon (1849-71), reinforced settler power. The Third Republic (1873-1940) placed the

islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique under a rather ambiguous regime of colonial status

combined with assimilation (citizenship for all inhabitants including local self-government

and metropolitan parliamentary representation). However, the majority black ex-slave and

potential/actual peasant population (as opposed to white and mulatto elites) participated

very little in politics, so that comparison with the British West Indies are still of some value.

The economic issues faced by all these new colonial regimes was how to cover the

costs of a greatly enhanced administrative (and often military) apparatus in the face of

stagnant or declining income from existing enterprises. In India handloom textile exports

did not lose their market to factory-produced British goods until well after the British had

taken over large portions of territory but neither trade nor the inherited peasant tax base

could keep the East India Company solvent. In the Caribbean, the freeing of slaves

immediately created a labor crisis for plantation production, augmented by a series of

7
In South Asia the British East India Company remained the nominal ruler until 1858
but in the 1790's its administrative branch was separated from its commercial operations
and became the model of neutral “Civil Service” (Tinker 19). On efforts at private sector
colonial governance in Africa by Britain, Belgium, France, Germany and Portugal, see
Austen 1987:123-25.
 9
shocks to export prices as competing sources of sugar entered the European markets. In

Africa, the partition of the late 1880's-early 1890's took place during a period of declining

prices for many extant exports, especially vegetable oils. In the end, increased peasant

cultivation proved to be the most economically and politically acceptable solution to all of

these problems but it only emerged after considerable effort had been put into systems of

production more compatible with metropolitan capitalism. These “false paths” (false at

least in terms of medium run results and ethnocentric assumptions) spanned the periods of

private sector and bureaucratic colonial regimes.

As with most aspects of modern colonialism, India presents the richest examples of

non-peasant experiments in economic development. Both the East India Company state

which came into full effect with the 1765 granting of the diwani (tax collection rights) in

Bengal and the reformed bureaucrat regime imposed by Parliamentary intervention in the

1790's sought to replicate in India some aspect of what its agents understood to be the

metropolitan pattern of capitalist development. In the case of the Company, the

understanding appears to have been implicit; it initially attempted to increase its profits

(even before it became a full territorial power) by asserting authority over hitherto

independent weavers who supplied the most valuable exports, cotton cloth (Hossain,

Parthasarati). There is certainly no indication here of an interest in suppressing local

handloom weaving in the interests of nascent British cotton mills (the mills were not fully in

place yet and, in any case, the EIC was more a competitor with, than an ally of,

metropolitan industry). We can see here rather some echo of the earlier European putting

out system whereby merchants first gained control over wool manufacturing, although in
 10
India the Company intervened only in markets rather than production processes, and even

this effort did not extend into the circuits that provided the weavers with their raw

materials.8 Whatever the immediate damage or potential long-term benefits that may have

arisen from these Company actions, it is extremely unlikely that Indian textile production

could have remained competitive on world markets with factory produced cotton cloth,

which was the ultimate cause of the Indian industry’s decline (Mitra 1978).

Taxes on land were therefore recognized early on as the financial basis of British

rule in India and their relationship to broader principles of political economy would be

elaborately debated throughout the nineteenth century (Stokes 1959). The assessment

system inherited from the Mughal empire had proved inadequate to cover the East India

Company’s costs during the first decades of rule so that in 1793, along with a general

reform of administration, Governor General Lord Cornwallis established a new “Permanent

Settlement” of revenues for the Bengal Presidency. The aim here, however, was not simply

to raise government funds more efficiently but also to use a new form of landed property to

set India on a path of development similar to that understood to have been experienced by

Britain.

The belief that such a change could occur through agriculture rested on both

theoretical and historical grounds. The theory guiding the principal architects of this

system was Physiocratism, which argued that agriculture rather than manufacturing was the

basis of all sound development. Their historical model was the British “improving landlord”

8
A Chicago graduate student, Spencer Leonard, is presently conducting research
which should give a more precise idea of the EIC ’s perceptions and intentions regarding
the Indian textile industry during this period.
 11
who had presumably contributed a great deal to England’s growth in the eighteenth

century.9 It was thought that by transforming the existing rural aristocrats, the zamindars,

from a combination of military-political-revenue authorities (often controlling very wide

territories) to private owners of more restricted peasant lands with public responsibility

only for taxes, a sound basis would be created for Indian capitalism (Guha 1963;

Marshall:120-26;144-46). Although the zamindars failed almost completely to fill this

envisioned role, even mainstream classical economic theory (including Thomas Robert

Malthus, who made his living teaching at the Haileybury training college for East India

Company administrators) remained convinced, until well into the nineteenth century, that

peasants could not provide a comparable developmental impetus (Dewey 1974).10

A second round of now more direct theoretical attacks against colonialism based

on peasant agriculture arose in the context of slave emancipation in the British Caribbean

(as well as that of European settlement in Australasia). The key figures here are a party of

classical economists known as the “Radical Colonial Reformers,” most especially Edward

Gibbon Wakefield and Herman Merivale (Semmel:76-91, 102 f.). In keeping with the

prevailing economists’ bias against smallholder agriculture, both men argued that in

colonial situations of land abundance, export agriculture was only possible through some

system of restricting the mobility of a potential labor force (slavery for the Carribean

9
The role of large landed property in eighteenth-century British economic
development is now much disputed (Allen 1999).
10
This question (with Malthus still a central figure) lives on in more contemporary
historical debates over the role of land enclosure (and thus the elimination of a secure
peasantry) in England’s pioneering move to industrial capitalism (Aston and Philpin 1985).
 12
plantations, a “sufficient price” on land for Wakefield’s proposed Australasian settlement

system). Merivale predicted that everywhere in the Caribbean except on islands with little

vacant land, such as Barbados, freed slaves would desert plantations and the economically

favored zones in which they were situated, moving off into remote areas to practice an

autonomous but relatively unproductive agriculture.

The Wakefield-Merivale thesis (usually named after more recent refinements the

“Nieboer-Domar Hypothesis”) has survived in modern scholarship as a major- if disputed-

explanation for the establishment of slavery in the New World.11 In its predictions of what

would happen after emancipation the thesis is partially correct: many ex-slaves did move

far away from their former plantations, which thus experienced serious labor problems,

although not in as straightforward a manner as Merivale suggested (Trouillot 1996). Where

Merivale falls most short is in his assumption that without the direction of European

capitalist employers

the half-civilized freedmen should sink into the indolence and apathy so

natural to their climate and condition; content themselves with an easily

acquired subsistence, and relapse by degrees into the savage state.

(Merivale: 320)

In the cases of both the British and French Caribbean, theories positing peasants

against capitalism played into the immediate interests of European planters who wanted

11
The idea actually goes back to Turgot in eighteenth century France; for a
genealogy and general discussion, see Curtin, Engerman and Patterson.
 13
every possible obstacle put in the way of labor mobility. 12 As long as the colonies were still

governed by settlers (or the French authoritarian-capitalist regime of Napoleon III) public

policy supported this position. Even under British Crown Colony rule and the French Third

Republic, settlers still exercised considerable influence over legislation and state

investment regarding land and labor. In the more significant and better-chronicled British

case, these measures included vagrancy and master and servants ordinances restricting

the ability of workers to negotiate “free” labor contracts, the imposition of above-market

prices on unoccupied (thus “public”) land, high taxes on peasant-produced exports, and-

most dramatically- the importation of hundreds of thousands of indentured Asian (mainly

Indian) laborers, especially to Trinidad and Guyana.

By the time most of tropical Africa was being colonized at the end of the nineteenth

century, economic policies in India and both the French and British Caribbean had already

taken a “peasant turn,” as will be seen. Nonetheless, early efforts to develop the “colonial

estates” of Africa also sought alternatives to peasant agriculture, which only emerged as a

conscious and positive policy around the time of World War I.

Africa became (and remains) the object of the most explicit debates between

advocates of indigenous smallholder versus more capitalized estate agriculture. However,

in the formative years of regional colonial systems, these arguments did not involve the

12
In later versions of his paper I hope to say more about plantation initiatives in
colonial India; for the most part they seem to have flourished in “tribal” areas outside the
areas of major peasant population or, in the case of early nineteenth century indigo,
functioned as a coercive form of contract farming (see below) similar to the
contemporaneous Dutch Indonesian “Cultivation System” (Bose 1993; Baardewijk; van
Niel).
 14
kind of heavyweight metropolitan economic interventions which had accompanied

comparable Indian and Caribbean deliberations. Instead the main participants were

directly interested parties: administrators, merchants, missionaries, and manufacturers

using tropical raw materials. In addition a few of what we would now call “public

intellectuals” with moral but not academic/theoretical commitment to African issues joined

in the fray, often in close alliance with administrators and missionaries.

African territories had not been annexed with any specific economic goals in mind

but for that very reason considerable thought had to be devoted to choosing the means by

which the new territories could cover their administrative costs, to say nothing of providing

some material benefits to their respective metropoles. Except in the few cases where

mineral wealth was readily available, agriculture was seen as the key basis for colonial

development, but the conditions for such enrichment did not appear immediately at hand,

even in regions which were already exporting significant quantities of palm products and

peanuts.

For British West Africa, the main source if such precolonial “legitimate trade” and

the eventual locus classicus of colonial smallholder exports, Anne Phillips has very

effectively chronicled the many strategies- from the retention of local slavery (Cooper) to

the imposition of capitalist -oriented land and labor policies- attempted or proposed before

European rulers committed themselves to “the peasant road” (Phillips:13)13. Even if

existing production systems were to be expanded and especially if regions distant from the

13
On concession companies, a device initially favored for both governance and
private enterprise by Britain, France, Germany and Portugal in Central Africa, see Austen
1987:123-25.
 15
coast would begin exporting new raw materials, especially cotton, transportation

infrastructure (mainly railways) would need to be built. Such undertakings immediately

confronted colonial authorities with the problem of recruiting labor in markets where this

factor, even more than in the post-emancipation Caribbean, was relatively scarce in

relationship to land. Colonial regimes thus put in place various forms of forced recruitment

and also contemplated (but only carried out seriously in the case of Kenya) the importation

of labor either across African territorial boundaries or, again, from India.

In principle, labor policies regarding public works were neutral with regard to private

sector development and eventually most African railways enabled peasant cultivators to

increase and even choose their export participation. However, in the early years the

expedients required by the construction process encouraged European prejudices

concerning the inherent laziness of Africans and in the Kenyan case (where a very early

railway was built mainly for strategic reasons) brought about a major settlement of

Europeans, as the only apparent means for providing this new investment with some

economic return. Moreover, once such European agricultural enterprises were in place,

British, French and German all used state coercion to provide them with labor.14

In all three colonial regions under discussion here, efforts at contrived or coerced

colonial capitalist development eventually failed, largely on economic grounds but also

because- in the absence of strong countervailing material interests- they also came under

14
Apart from Kenya, the major cases of state support for European estate
agriculture in the pre-World War I era are British Uganda (Mutibwa); French Cote d’Ivoire
(Chauveau) and Soudan [Mali] (Roberts ), German East Africa [Tanganyika] and
Cameroon (Iliffe; Michel). For the prolongation of French forced labor regimes see
Cooper.
 16
severe moral criticism at home. The Indian zamindari revenue system was the least

morally objectionable, at least in its initial establishment (as the reform of a much more

problematic situation); it simply dissolved into a peasant system whose problems arose

from other factors than landlords (Panda). Caribbean sugar plantations had always been

a target of anti-slavery (and later anti-indenture) criticism; but they managed to survive, and

even thrive to some extent, for a half century after emancipation due to both a

modernization of their financial organization and processing operations and support of

their labor needs through the public policies discussed above. It was only with the severe

drop in sugar prices of the 1890's, and the fear that these colonies would therefore default

on their modest development loans, that official opinion began seriously to consider an

alternative economic base (Will 1970). In tropical Africa, most capitalist agricultural

ventures failed on grounds of their high costs in relation to low prices for their products

(whether long-term like cotton or fluctuating like most exports) or the unsuitability of their

scale and cultivation methods for the ecology of tropical crops (Austin 1996). Whatever the

balance between government support and public criticism, European large-scale farming

could survive only in a few niches, like the geographical one of the Kenya Highlands (which

replicates temperate zone ecology) or crop systems requiring high degrees of

standardization, mechanization or transport management (tea, sisal, palm oil and

bananas).

From the viewpoint of colonial regimes, it is safe to say that peasants won out in

most of these territories by default. However, by the first decades of the twentieth century,

smallholder cultivation had become the norm for most tropical commodities, with
 17
concomitant adjustments in the systems by which more heavily capitalized marketing and

processing were separated from cultivation (Daviron). This worldwide trend provided an

environment in which colonial regimes could maintain export revenues without extensive

interventions in peasant societies. But does this mean that we can see a common pattern

of development and whether common or not, did it produce the kind of growth which could

sustain itself through periods of more ambitious policies and a changing global economy?

3. Peasantries Ascendent: Regional Bases and European Conceptions

It is a good deal easier to recognize the space left for peasant agriculture by the

failure of European regimes to organize dependent economies according to their concepts

of capitalism than it is to discuss, in a coherent and informed way, the varieties of

smallholder cultivation systems which became the common basis of colonial revenue. The

first task is to identify and compare the rural communities within each of the regions under

consideration here so as understand what kind of historical peasantry was encountered by

colonial regimes. Next it will be necessary to examine the specific European

understandings and politics which would be brought to peasant-based colonial policies.

Only in the last section of this paper will I turn to the most difficult task, analyzing the

peasant economies themselves. As will be seen I am only at a preliminary stage in this

effort.

India, the Caribbean and Africa certainly did not enter into their confrontations with

modern colonialism from a common rural base. If they emerged from it with some form of

agricultural economy which can usefully be discussed under a single rubric, colonialism

itself was a critical factor in this definition. But in all three cases something we can call, in
 18
the broad economic terms offered earlier, a “peasantry” did exist. In order to understand

the changes brought by colonialism (and their limits) the different starting points need to be

considered.

India is not only the first of these regions to become a modern colony15 but also the

one with the most “classic” and long-established precolonial peasantry. There is much

debate among South Asianist scholars about how stable or self-contained the precolonial

village communities of rural India ever were, but they clearly existed as identifiable spaces,

often with a long history of occupation in a specific locale.16 They were not fully

autonomous communities, but it is precisely their link to “high” literate cultures, with

concomitant forms of political and economic subjugation which makes them “peasants” as

the term has been defined here. Land ownership was also a complex and elusive matter in

India and there were many uncultivated zones into which farmers could move, but state

authorities, through some combination of centralized record-keeping and complex local

hierarchies, almost always managed to extract taxes from them. The claims of this

hierarchy, and the related caste system, upon the peasantry also involved some reciprocal

obligations: at a minimum, protection and ritual services but also sometimes the

maintenance of markets, food reserves and even irrigation systems.

Caribbean society cannot be discussed in pre-colonial terms since the present

15
In the ultimate version of this project, serious attention must also be paid to
Indonesia, which has a parallel but, I would argue, critically different, colonial history (for
some indications, see Hasan 1987).
16
This balance or ambiguity can also be found in the scholarly literature. I am using
as my dual points of reference Marriot (1955) and Bremen (1988); see also Ludden 1999:
espec. 69-76.
 19
population consists almost entirely of colonial (or “proto-colonial”) immigrants from Africa,

Asia and Europe. The vast majority of peasant villages in the Caribbean were founded in

the nineteenth century either at the time of emancipation (for Africans) or at the end of

indentures (for Asians). Like Indians, Caribbean peasants share a “folk” (in this case

“creole”) version of the dominant colonial culture, blending it less with deeply rooted local

beliefs, practices and languages than with those (in whatever transformed state) they

brought with them from the continents of origin. Control over land was likewise not

inherited but had rather to be contested (even in frontier areas) against the claims of

planters and the colonial state. Many Caribbean villages did remain close enough to

plantations and urban zones so as to combine independent agriculture with some wage

labor (Mintz 1974:157-79; Trouillot 1996). In short, the Caribbean peasantry is entirely a

colonial phenomenon and although its formation and organization was often (but not

always) quite autonomous, European domination was always the larger context within

which it operated.

The Africans who can be considered peasants in economic and political terms prior

to the colonial era would nevertheless fall into an exterior category of “tribals” within South

Asian or Caribbean/Latin American classifications. Agricultural villages clearly existed,

often with more obvious histories of migration and shifting cultivation than in India. What is

lacking here is the close link with dominant literate cultures and a consequent degree of

subordination to political and social superiors. Villages could contain multiple hierarchies

based on early settlement, links to external state conquest, “caste” (referring mainly to

marked artisanal roles) and wealth. But control of land was seldom a source of any but
 20
ritual power and the critical determinant of success was “wealth in people” which could

translate into both strong kinship/communal ties and the appropriation of outsiders as

slaves (better defined within internal circuits as “perpetual juniors” than chattel) (Thornton,

Berry 2001).

This variety of situations (and I have vastly underplayed the variations within each

region) implies that the common term “peasant” may be more a colonial discursive

construct rather than an empirically valid definition of what European authorities in India, the

Caribbean and Africa actually confronted. However, in dealing with colonial situations,

European discourse has a certain empirical power of its own, so before considering what

changes actually occurred in the rural societies and economies of these regions, we need

to examine what administrators, missionaries and their metropolitan interlocutors thought

they saw there and how these perceptions were translated into policy.

One of the interesting findings from (at least this stage) of my research is that the

adoption of peasant policies in each of these regions seems to have occurred with

surprisingly little reference to earlier examples. The very extensive discussions and

practices of peasant policy in India are evoked only very late and not very clearly in the

debates on what to do with post-emancipation Caribbean colonies. In Africa, Indian

administrative models (especially “indirect rule”) are quite evident but otherwise India is

mainly seen as a colony threatened by over-educated “babus” while the Caribbean

represents the menace of “natives” deracinated through capitalism. Peasant systems thus

had to be reinvented as new regions entered the realm of modern colonial rule. The

common inspiration seems to be the economic situation already evoked and perhaps a
 21
paternalist-romantic disposition on the part of those Europeans who took up careers as

colonial administrators.

India provides us with by far the most elaborate researches and debates on

peasant affairs, although the exchanges take place mainly among colonial officials

themselves and British economists directly linked to the management of South Asian

empire. Advocacy of a peasant vs. zamindar (landlord) based revenue system began in

the early 1800's when the conquest of Mysore brought large new territories in South India

under the control of the Raj. In variant forms, this doctrine was reinforced during the era of

Evangelical-Utilitarian dominance from the 1830's through the early 1850's, a period which

coincided with the expansion of the Raj into northwest India. Following the 1857 Mutiny

(blamed in part on too much British interference with indigenous structures of power) there

was reversion to a zamindari system in Oudh (in North Central India, the last region to

come under direct British rule) and Britain refrained from formally annexing any more

indigenous states, which were left to manage their finances on their own. The motive, a

this point, was less economic “improvement” than the maintenance of social and political

order (Metcalfe: 191-94).

In his 1805-07 arguments for replacing the Bengal Permanent Settlement model

with a riyotwari (peasant) system of land revenue Thomas Munro, then Collector (tax officer)

for the newly annexed territories of the Madras Presidency, offered the essential arguments

for basing the Indian colonial economy on smallholders rather than landlords . Foremost is

his conviction that landlords were a British institution which had no counterpart in the

“village republics” of India. Second is the belief that public revenues would be increased if
 22
the colonial state attempted direct and revisable assessments of the small-scale land units

actually responsible for agricultural output. And finally it was suggested that such farmers

might be more prone to invest in agricultural improvements if freed from the incumbrance of

fixed payments to zamindar intermediaries (Stein 1989: 124-35).

From the viewpoint of East India officials at the time and even from the recorded

concerns of later Evangelical revenue reformers such as Robert Bird (Penner 1986:66-8),

the most persuasive of these arguments was the second. The Permanent Settlement had

limited tax demands in the double expectation that the costs of British rule would remain

stable and that landlord-based commercialization of Indian agriculture would increase the

East India Company’s trade revenues. When neither prediction proved true, the need for

increasing revenue, even at a cost of greater administrative effort, proved overwhelming

(Gupta 1992: 73-75).

However the riyotwari or Mhalwari (village) system may have worked in practice, at

a theoretical level it combined two features of British colonial ideology which have been

most attacked in recent scholarship: the romantic belief in a static peasant base beneath

a changing surface of imperial structures in India and the Utilitarian argument for a regime

which controlled its subjects without any intermediary bodies. The first notion comes

directly from Munro and other “men on the spot” and it is sometimes given credit for fulfilling

its own prophecy by freezing peasant society as a means (whether conscious or not) of

meeting the state’s primary fiscal needs (Breman 1988: 39-40 et. passim). The idea of

the absolutist colonial state was also embraced by local administrators, but it was given a

more theoretical expression in the writings of such noted metropolitan thinkers as James
 23
and John Stuart Mill, who defended a peasant revenue system on grounds of the state’s

right, as ultimate proprietor of territorial land, to collect “rent” from its tenants, leaving them

with only the earnings from their own labor and capital contributions to agriculture.

In contrast to the Permanent Settlement, these peasantist arguments do not suggest

a very dynamic role for Indian cultivators within the colonial economy. It was rather the Raj,

by its infrastructural contributions of political order, transport and (especially in the Punjab

and Uttar Pradash) irrigation, which would create the conditions for economic growth,

without necessarily inciting (sometimes even suppressing) social change at the base of the

system. But analysis of such actual or potential change is best left to a later discussion

which focuses more on Indian cultivators themselves.

While peasantist ideology and policy is associated in India with a conservative and

even (due to initially very high taxation rates) exploitative position, in the Caribbean it has

the cachet of a heroic liberal and populist struggle against the very immediate threat of

plantation proprietors. For the first three decades after emancipation the planters were

supported in their position by the Colonial Office and the governors it sent to the

Caribbean. The precedent of India mean very little to this establishment, since the East

India Company and later India Office were entirely separate organizations. To Colonial

Reformers like Wakefield and Merivale, a “colony” was exclusively “a territory of which the

soil is entirely or principally owned by settlers from the mother country.” (Merivale:xii). This

definition did not apply to South Asia (Merivale considered Ceylon [Sri Lanka], which was

under Colonial Office rule, an anomaly) but it did cover the Caribbean.

Support for peasant cultivation by former slaves initially came only from those who
 24
had been at the forefront of the anti-slavery movement: mostly missionaries but also such

lay figures as James Stephens, who was, however, replaced in 1847 as Permanent

Undersecretary (head civil servant) of the Colonial Office by Merivale. Missionaries,

especially the Baptists in Jamaica, remained the strongest supporters of peasantisation,

helping to found freedman villages in the 1830's and supporting the demands for better

access to land which- after their denial by the colonial authorities- led to the Morants Bay

Rebellion of 1865 (Holt 1992:270-73).

This rebellion and its bloody repression by the Jamaican Governor Eyre produced

extensive discussion of West Indian affairs in Britain and accelerated the shift to Crown

colony government in the Caribbean itself. However, the contribution of these events to a

more peasant-oriented policy occurred only indirectly. It is interesting to note that John

Stuart Mill, who was won over to peasants as a general basis for productive agriculture

(Dewey 1974) and applied these principles both to India and, by extension, the perennial

Irish Question” (Holt 323-28) did not contemplate such a solution in his writings on the

Caribbean (Mill 1850 (1984); 1964 :104-5, 237).

The first evidence of any official sympathy for peasant development comes from

several of the governors sent to Jamaica and Trinidad in the decades immediately after the

abolition of local self-government (Holt ; Lewis). A number of these men had considerable

Indian experience (Holt:) and one, Arthur Hamilton Gordon, also supported the rights of

Indian smallholders in Fiji (Chapman). However, none of the policies on land sales and

taxation advocated in his era made any lasting impact, due to either local planter

opposition or Colonial Office indifference.

 25
It was only with the sugar market crisis of the 1890's and the subsequent Royal

Commission of 1897 that a firm position was taken by the Colonial Office in favor of

developing peasant agriculture in the Caribbean. This period coincided with a major rise

in peasant contributions to exports from these islands (see below) but now the territorial

governments were urged to take positive steps towards making land available, creating

supportive transport infrastructure and even providing agricultural extension services. Such

modest, or at least gradualist, goals did not appeal to the imagination of the then Colonial

Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, who still hoped for major private capital investments in the

“undeveloped estates” of the overseas empire, and were never very vigorously prursued.

But capitalists were difficult to attract to the Caribbean and peasants had now at least

gained recognition as a key factor in the future development of this faltering region (Will

1970). Within the permanent establishment of the Colonial Office, moreover, such liberal

figures as Sidney Olivier would continue, up to the time of World War II, to advocate greater

investment in Caribbean peasant agriculture (Rich 1988).

The great ambitions of Chamberlain and his contemporaries in the French and

German colonial establishment helps explain the insistence on attempting various forms of

capitalist development in the newly acquired tropical African colonies before a peasant

solution was finally adopted. Here again missionaries provided critical early support for

such early peasant endeavors as Gold Coast cocoa growing and would play a major role in

various battles against planters, most notably in German Cameroon before World War I

(Hallden 1968) and in the interwar struggle to keep white settlers from expanding their

landholdings in Kenya and their political influence over neighboring East African territories
 26
(Rich 1986:74-75; Oliver 1952).17

In both British and French West Africa, the peasant agricultural option had at least

the passive support of the most established local representatives of European capital, the

coastal merchant firms. Although these entrepreneurs took advantage of colonial rule to

move their buying posts inland, they were, for the most part, uninterested in fixed

investments in agriculture18 and feared interference with their own interests from

concessionaires who established themselves in such positions (Suret-Canale 1964: 203f;

Hopkins 1973:213). In Britain, some of the merchants also allied themselves with radical

critics of colonial exploitation (including E.D. Morel, famous for his role in the campaign

against King Leopold’s Congo) to argue for less intrusive forms of economic enterprise

eventually including support for collective peasant landholding similar to (although

apparently not derived from) earlier concepts of the “village republic” in India (Phillips:66-

68).

Eventually the lobby behind African peasant policies would also include British and

French colonial administrators, although, as Phillips and Spittler have both shown, it took

some decades of capitalist experimentation and racist devaluation of African abilities

before such a position took hold. However, the administrative “peasant lobby” was not only

17
Much earlier in the nineteenth century British missionaries, with their own romantic
view of peasanties, took on a similar role in South Africa, but could not prevail against the
political dominaiton of white settlers and the linkages between the local mining industry and
more capitalistic agriculture (Comaroff and Comaroff: 1997:121-65).
18
The exceptions were some of the German firms in Cameroon who established
cocoa plantations on the volcanic soils around Mt. Cameroun. The crop was a bad choice
but the region proved suitable to estate cultivation of palm oil and bananas (Michel).
 27
effective in publicizing the idea of the “paysans noirs”19 (Spittler 10, 101-04) but also acted

to block Kenya and settlers (Lonsdale and Berman) and efforts by the Lever Brothers

corporation to establish palm oil plantations in Nigeria (Phillips 97-100).

Despite their oppositional posture toward more capitalistic agriculture, proponents

of peasant systems in Africa were far more concerned from the outset with the details of

export crop production than their equivalents in India. This attention was needed because

African colonial regimes did not inherit significant precolonial taxation systems and they

could not count on commodities circulating within their territories to provide the revenue for

their own upkeep. Moreover, these colonies never attained the long-term, self-referential

strategic status of India but were instead subject to new awakenings of development

enthusiasm as the result of crises in Europe (recovery from World Wars, the Great

Depression, temporary shortages of cotton and vegetable oils). When it finally became

obvious that the key to twentieth-century European prosperity lay elsewhere, it was already

time to follow India’s more evident example of decolonization.

On the basis of sensitivity to these continuing economic pressures, Phillips argues

that British administrators were never so fully committed to peasantries as other historians

have claimed; she notes that in Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast they even attempted to

aid plantation production. The problem was simply a lack of labor supplies and the

cooperation from indigenous growers that were needed to turn a significant profit.20

19
This is the title of a very successful novel (it went through two editions and was
made into a film) by a French West African district administrator (Delavignette 1946/1931;
Cohen 1977:7-8).
20
Lever Brothers (later Unilever), a major international soap and oil producer, did
 28
However, even in her insistence that peasant production was neither the most efficient

production system for African cash crops nor the real economic choice of European rulers,

Phillips acknowledges that the system was supported on grounds of political stability (106).

Whether or not such stability was achieved can only be evaluated from a closer

examination of colonial peasant economies at work.

4. Peasantries Ascendent: Productivity, Stasis, Transformation

Whatever the constraints which brought colonial regimes to rely upon peasant

producers, these did become the mainstay (in the Caribbean case, a varying major

element) of market production and government revenues. It is thus necessary first to

document the scale and circumstances of this growth and its relationship to public

finances. I will then consider the degree to which smallholders in colonial economies

remained peasants as opposed to becoming capitalist entrepreneurs and/or a displaced

labor force. The last question will lead to some consideration of postcolonial

consequences, although the present paper will not get very far into that issue.

In all these regions, peasant agriculture emerged as a critical component of the

colonial market economy and revenue base well before its significance became

recognized. In the case of India, rural tax collection was recognized as the great prize of

the initial British territorial acquisitions in Bengal and through the firs decades of the

twentieth century, land revenues remained the main source (usually over 50%) of

government income (Kumar 1982:916-30). In a close examination of the early stages of

manage to set up larger plantations in the less fastidious Belgian Congo but found that the
profits here fell below what they would have earned by buying fruit from smaller,
independent suppliers (Fieldhouse 1978: 494 f.).
 29
Company rule in Bengal (1765-84) Raja Datta (2000:333-39) has demonstrated that

revenues collections increased, entirely on the basis of peasant production. Unfortunately

for the Company, its own expense increased at an even more rapid rate, thus inspiring the

landlord-oriented Permanent Settlement of 1793. For India as a whole, there also seems

to have been a increase of production under British rule up to the late nineteenth century

(Guha 1992:38). However, the very high rates of tax assessment, particularly under the

peasant-centered riyotwari system of the Madras Presidency, discouraged agricultural

growth, which only revived after the rates were lowered from the 1840's onward (Guha

1992:37; Tomlinson 1993:45-7). On the other hand Datta (2000:337-8) argues that simply

by insisting that all taxes be paid in cash rather than kind, early British rule forced greater

peasant involvement in market production. Although some of these increases resulted

from higher yields per acre due to the introduction of new plant varieties (particularly for

cotton) and irrigation, the major factor here was simply a movement into hitherto

uncultivated lands, often with serious ecological costs (Guha 1992:39; Mann).

In the post-emancipation British Caribbean, the movement of former slaves and

indentured servants away from established plantation regions was originally seen as

unproductive, since such peasant cultivators would no longer cultivate crops which could

either be exported or taxed. Tax revenues here, however, depended heavily upon these

same populations, since they raised mainly through customs duties upon imports,

consumed by the majority populations, rather than upon the incomes of the planter elite.

Caribbean government expenses, while never as high- even in proportion to population

and territory- as the much or intensely administered India, did go up in the course of the
 30
nineteenth century, particularly after the shift to crown colony regimes in the 1860's (Eisner

1961:360-65).21 Customs remained the main revenue source first because they were the

easiest to collect but also, it was thought, because their very regressive nature would put

pressure upon free populations to return to plantation labor (Moore 1987:114). Whether or

not governments were, in fact dependent upon peasant production thus rested upon the

extent to which the potential labor force was able not only to escape the plantations but also

enter the market economy independently.

The degree of such commercial peasantisation varies considerably across

colonies, based upon both demographic factors and the energy of competing plantation

economies. Taking just the four major British territories: Barbados remained a plantation

system (and never shifted to Crown Colony status) largely because little unoccupied land

was available for peasants; Trinidad and Guyana experienced (up to the crisis of the

1890's) a balance between robust sugar production and peasantisation; finally, Jamaica,

with relatively weak sugar, became the most peasantised of these islands

In Guyana and Trinidad, where African freedmen displayed a tendency to move into

urban rather than rural occupations, Indians completing their indentures took advantage of

more generous opportunities for land ownership than had previously been offered to ex-

slaves and remained in the countryside as independent cultivators (Look Lai 1993:222-

53). For Jamaica, the best indicator of commercial peasantisation is the growing

21
Eisner is convenient for Jamaica and also the main source for Marshall’s general
survey, but eventually I expect to do my own research on these statistics for a greater range
of Caribbean colonies, since the information is easily available from published government
reports.
 31
replacement of sugar among the island’s exports by crops for which peasants were the

major producers, mainly coffee and especially bananas (Eisner: 1961: 236-57).

However, as in India, the assessment of peasant contributions to commercialized

agriculture would have to take into account production for local markets as well as exports

and in my preliminary research I have not found much information on this.

The Caribbean picture is also complicated by various forms of symbiosis between

peasant and estate agriculture. Perhaps the most widespread form is the combination of

independent farming and part-time wage labor by smallholders, a situation which has been

best assessed for the French islands (Lasserre 1972). In both the primary plantation

export crop, sugar, and the major peasant innovation, bananas, agrarian capitalists shifted,

during the early twentieth century, to the role of contractors who bought produce from

peasants but then undertook its processing and/or transportation, thus retaining

considerable control over the industries (Holt 347-65; Singh70-77). Whether the farmers in

this situation should still be considered peasants will be discussed below.

The predominance of peasants in tropical African agriculture, especially in the more

visible export sector, is too well-known to require extensive exposition here. In addition to

already established exports such as palm products (where some ground was lost to

plantations) and peanuts, African became the producers of new cash crops such as cocoa,

coffee, American cotton and tobacco. Even in a planter-dominated economy like that of

Kenya, peasants made major inroads into coffee growing before World War II (Kitching).

The interesting comparative question is the relationship between commercial

farming and taxation. African colonial regimes had far more elaborate apparatuses of
 32
local administration than did their Caribbean counterparts, but unlike the Indian Raj, did not

depend for their main operating revenues upon direct payments from rural subjects.

Following resistence to poll taxes in its Gold Coast enclave in the 1860's and a major Hut

Tax rebellion Sierra Leone in 1898, Britain did not impose any direct levies upon large

parts of West Africa, relying almost entirely upon customs duties for revenue (Phillips: 43,

56). Even in those colonies which did tax directly (including all the French, Belgian and

German dependencies) the rates were generally not high enough to outweigh customs

duties as a source of income or arouse the extended criticism and reassessment of India

(Hailey:547, 1458-59). The stated purpose of much direct taxation was less immediate

public revenue than the creation of incentives for participation in market production. In the

early stages of rule and the cases of remote areas such participation was envisaged as

wage labor, but in time, as more of the interior became connected to the coast by efficient

transport, the favored result was peasant cash-cropping.

The implication of these distinctions is that the Caribbean and African colonies

retained a somewhat more commercial character than did British India, with its elaborate

and thoroughly dominant state apparatus. The degree to which any of them served vital

economic interests of their metropoles cannot be determined here but it is necessary to

consider how far they- or the situations they helped create- went in transforming the non-

European rural economies over which they presided.

While the existence of peasants at the base of colonial economies has never been

as controversial for historians as it often was for European participants, the long-term

outcome of this engagement between an advanced capitalist market and what appear to
 33
be very “traditional” units of rural production remains very much in question, from both a

political and analytic perspectives. No one can seriously argue any more that peasant

societies represent an unchanged substratum of “dualistic” economies but the universally

recognized elements of change are more material than social. Colonial peasants

expanded their output, took up new crops, moved into new territories and even adopted

some (but not generally very complex) new technologies. What may or may not have

changed/be changing is the social organization and “moral economy” of production: the

small-scale units employing a large percentage of family labor and valuing security of

tenure and social relations over possibly higher incomes. The appropriateness of such a

description for rural societies during or after colonial rule varies between the three regions

under discussion here, within them and according to the larger agenda of those who have

written about colonial and postcolonial peasants. In the concluding section of this paper I

will discuss three models of peasant transformation (or lack of it) and indicate their utility in

making sense of both the differences and common elements across the broader colonial

world I am trying to examine.

The three models will be labeled (respectively and with partial debt to those who

have studied them) the uncaptured peasantry, bullock capitalism and the displaced

peasantry. The first is most readily implies a minimal transformation and is associated

with Africa; the second sees peasants as transformed into capitalists, although within

certain limits of scale and technology and is most associated with studies of India; the

third, most evident in the Caribbean, envisions capitalist incursions completely eliminating

the autonomy of peasants by transforming them into some variety of rural or migrant
 34
proletariat. In most cases, or at least those I know well enough to cite here, the categories

overlap quite a bit. There are few, if any, peasantries which can exit entirely from market

engagements; “Bullock capitalists” share at least as much with smallholders whom we

would comfortably label peasants as they do with agribusinesses. And the economic

practices- to say nothing of the social values- of displaced peasants may indicate

continuities with more autonomous rural worlds. I will thus use these models mainly as

heuristic devices to discuss the various implications of a continuing peasant presence in

colonial and postcolonial economies

The uncaptured peasant is a concept deriving from Africa (Hyden) and implying that

the impact of capitalism (as well as, in Hyden’s Tanzania case, abortive postcolonial

socialism) has not been powerful enough to prevent peasants from withdrawing from

market systems which no longer fit their expectations. There are some echoes in this

position of the old Merivale (and even Thomas Carlyle) critique of newly emancipated

Caribbean slaves who would, unless compelled to do otherwise, satisfy themselves with

eating easily cultivated “pumpkins” rather than making their obligatory contributions to

national development. As in the nineteenth century Caribbean, the peasants of

postcolonial Tanzania had not really withdrawn from the market but in this case switched to

informal circuits across the border with capitalist Kenya.22 Nonetheless, given the leverage

of relatively abundant land resources, African peasants have been able to meet minimal tax

and consumption requirements while ceasing to produce major cash crops such as cocoa

22
Moreover, within a decade Kenya, under the highly corrupt Moi regime would be
presented as an anti-model against the more sound (but still peasant-based) reform
policies of post-socialist Tanzania (Lofchie 1989).
 35
in Ghana during similar periods of socialism and corrupt successor regimes. Peasants

under comparable demographic conditions in South India similarly fled from their assigned

landholdings in reaction to excessively high tax assessments in the early nineteenth

century (Kumar 1965:108-10). However, as the twentieth century case of India indicates,

demography also suggests the limits to such autonomy, since colonial conditions, in the

long run produced population increases and the occupation of most cultivatable land.

Under these conditions, even food sufficiency becomes an issue, as it certainly did in India,

and some transformation of agriculture is called for.

With or without “green revolutions” in food production, the intensified market

integration of colonial peasant communities brought with it the penetration of the village by

agents of capitalism. India is the classical instance of this phenomenon, not via the

expected zamindar improving landlord but rather through merchant-money lenders and

wealthier peasants taking on similar functions. Given the costs of producing cash crops

(seeds, irrigation, draft animals and carts), the unpredictability of harvests and the

inevitability of tax demands, peasants throughout India frequently found themselves in debt

to the buyers of their crops and were often obligated to mortgage their lands. For British

administrators such invasions of the countryside by capitalism became unwelcome since

the threat to security (especially following a Deccan uprising of 1875) outweighed any

possible gains in productivity. Thus a whole series of legislative acts were promulgated

limiting both lending and land purchases by “outsiders” (Tomlinson 1993:64).

Even without this government intervention, however, units of effective agricultural

production never became concentrated in colonial India, even in the Punjab irrigation
 36
colonies where much of the land was sold to potential cultivators in large, contiguous plots

(Fox:1985:59; Ali 1988:241). One explanation for such reticence was the very fact that the

colonial state, like its predecessors, remained the major agricultural capitalist via irrigation

projects throughout the country (Fox:53 f.; Baker 1984a:13). In the Punjab some of the

largest landlords received their holdings as rewards for state service and continued, as

many Permanent Settlement zamindars before them, to pursue their careers in urban rather

than rural realms. Zamindars remained significant landholders in the canal-Irrigated Doab

districts of western Uttar Pradash, but the resulting agricultural growth depended mainly

upon the efforts of small to medium sized peasant holdings (Stone).

A more widespread explanation for peasant persistence, and one also applicable

to Africa, where state capitalism has generally not been a major factor in successful

development, lies in the cycles of growth and stabilization or decline in various forms of

agriculture. Christopher Baker (1984) has reviewed a whole series of “Green Revolutions”

in colonial India and suggested that they functioned in spurts of limited duration beginning

among fairly wealthy entrepreneurs employing wage labor but then shifting to less affluent

participants through the intermediacy of middleman (merchants, money lenders, state

agents). At this point the efficiency advantages of more intensive cultivation (never well

proven in either India or Africa in any case) were outweighed by the low labor costs of

smallholder competition and the other attractions of urban over rural life. Several studies

of cocoa growing in West Africa (Austin 1987; Hopkins:1977; Monga 1996) have

demonstrated somewhat similar cycles of development from more capitalistic to more

peasant-based cultivation, although in these cases declines in export prices played a

 37
major role.

The outcome of all reverse transformations has not been a homogeneous peasant

society but rather one where “big men,” whether merchant-money lenders or richer (“bullock

capitalist”23) peasants, have maintained patron-client rather than socially uninhibited

capitalistic relationships with poorer farmers who often become their legal tenants.24 In

indicating why money lenders in Western India allowed peasants to stay on land which they

had forfeited through debt, David Hardiman (1996) argues that the new landholders were

constrained by both a disinterest in farming and a need to operate within a moral code

which bound the debtholder to behave “righteously” just as the peasant was obliged to pay

his debt. Gareth Austin, who firmly believes that richer cocoa farmers and brokers in

colonial Ghana fit the definition of capitalists, nonetheless suggests that actual expulsions

from farms only occurred on grounds of non-citizenship within the relevant chiefdom, a

status which was and is, of course subject to negotiation on economic as well as socio-

political grounds (Austin 1988:72; Berry 2001).

We have evidence for at least one African practice of openly displacing poorer

farmers in the Tanzanian coffee-growing region of Bukoba/Kagera (a focus for Hyden’s

“uncaptured peasant” thesis). Brad Weiss has shown that Haya farmer-traders do evict

23
I am using this term somewhat differently than its originators (Rudolph and
Rudolph 1887:49-55) since they refer only to “middle peasants” without clientele in the
postcolonial era. The common useful term is the bullock (and cart) as a form of capital
which provides major advantages within a still familiar range of technology and
relationships. See also Charlesworth 1978.
24
in almost all these case migrant laborers from outside the community or, in India,
its lowest caste depths, are also employed by more capitalistic farmers, but not used to
squeeze out peasants.
 38
debtors from forfeited land, but replace them with a new clientele of kin. Here the results of

colonial market integration- investment in coffee trees and freehold rights in land- have

deprived some peasants of secure tenure but encouraged their successors to invest in a

combination of social claims to land and social-reproductive capital, as opposed to any

effort to intensify cultivation on a more material-capitalist basis.

The peasants displaced in Kagera do not represent a major transformative trend,

since they are not numerous and many have found new, if marginal, lands to cultivate.

However, there are other colonial and postcolonial situations in which no agricultural land is

available for growing populations and/or fully capitalist farming (or non-farming but land-

intensive industries such as tourism or suburban residential development) have invaded

the terrain of peasants. Both these possibilities are most prevalent in the Caribbean, with

its history of capitalist plantations and close proximity to the United States, although here,

as in other matters the Caribbean may be a harbinger of postcolonial trends in Africa and

India.

I can only make a few comments on migration here because, among other reason, it

is a topic I hope to explore at length in is own terms as a defining characteristic of the link

between postcolonial societies and globalization (Basch et al.). In terms of peasantries, a

major issue is how ties between urban migration sites and villages of origin are

reproduced or dissolved. The Caribbean literature (Marshall 1970; Trouillot 1988:282-3)

suggests that emigrants, particularly to the United States, have tended to lose contact with

their villages possibly because the villages themselves are less culturally “rooted” than in

Africa and India. In Nigeria Sara Berry (1985; see also 2001) has pointed to the
 39
investment of resources earned in urban settings back into villages, not for agricultural

production but rather for the construction of large private house or public buildings such as

mosques and churches. The key goal here is obviously social capital, which still seems to

depend upon maintaining ties to rural communities of origin. Peter Geschiere and Misty

Bastian point to a darker side of this communal consciousness: witchcraft beliefs which

compel these kinds of investments and are in turn the result of fears about occult costs to

rural populations of success by their fellow villagers who move into the more dominant

sectors of the economy.

The continuity of peasantries in more concrete and possibly more productive (but

also deceptive) forms can be discerned in the examination of contract farming. This

phenomenon has emerged fairly recently in both Africa (Little and Watts) and India (Chandy

and Tyagi) but was established during the latter colonial era in the Caribbean banana

industry and has been studied more closely there (Trouillot 1988; Grossman 1998; see

also Holt 347-65 ). It has some affinity to notorious early nineteenth-century agricultural

systems in Bengal and Dutch Indonesia which compelled peasants to produce cash crops

for sale to either government agents or private processors and shippers (Bose:74-5,148-

55; Van Niel). The common denominator is the combination of peasant cultivation with

capitalist secondary sectors, although the modern forms involve at least formal (and

perhaps substantive) freedom for the producers

In contract farming systems, cultivators retain ownership of their own land, held in

small units, and immediate control over production processes, which are at least partially

based on family labor. In this sense they remain peasants. However, sales are made to a
 40
single buyer (in many Caribbean islands to a local authority which is in turn contracted to a

metropolitan firm). The buyers determine what kind of bananas will be grown, provide

capital inputs (fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides) and specify how the bananas are to be

handled and boxed. It is thus possible to see this kind of agriculture as disguised wage

labor, equivalent to piece work at home for clothing manufacture, although the peasants (or,

in Trouillot’s terms “part-peasants”) do have some option unavailable to urban laborers of

this kind. They cannot be coerced into following all the specifications of the contractors,

retain some exit options (they may use their land to grow other cash crops or food or even

eat part of the banana crop themselves) and they can invest their earnings in more land.

Contract farming, like migration, connects peasants very directly to global

capitalism although at high costs (including the risks of losing their overseas markets, as

seems to have occurred with America’s recent victory in the “banana war” with the

European Union, which had guaranteed import quotas for African and Caribbean former

colonies). The evaluation of this system as yet another adaptation of peasant systems to

world markets is thus difficult. The “peasant “ character of such farming would also require

more knowledge of Caribbean village ethnography than I presently possess.

5. Conclusion

This paper did not begin with a question but rather with an observation: that there

seemed something incongruent about the integration of Africa, the Caribbean and India

into the orbit of advanced capitalist systems on the basis of peasant production. Some

decades ago this process would have been described as “the articulation of modes of
 41
production” for the purposes of maintaining a dependent relationship between the centers

and peripheries of the world system. Today this view seems less plausible, since the

former colonial territories have proven to be less functional to that system than other

regions of the world; even when they become more fully integrated through something like

contract farming, they may be abandoned in favor of more critical trading partners.

Peasantisation is thus a form of marginal integration, made possible by the expansion of

global markets through, among other factors, the development of colonial infrastructures,

but also made vulnerable to competition from ever-expanding alternative sources of

tropical and semi-tropical agricultural goods. In any particular place, therefore, peasant

economies were a necessity more of colonial administration than of capitalism. The

consequences of this situation for other aspects of postcoloniality- both economic, political

and cultural- remain to be explored.

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