The Empire’s Famine: Colonial Property and the Making of a Punitive Labour Regime in India 1803–1870

The article examines the upper Doab or what is now referred to as West U.P. from 1803 and onwards to interrogate the role of colonial property in developing a famine labour regime in the 1860s. The article shows how colonial notions of continuity and fixity in land undermine the relationship between variegated ecologies and the multiple economies (military labour, agro-pastoralism, cattle and grain trade) that depend on it. Moreover, the idiom of ‘relief’ is deployed to punitively organise the famine distressed into work sites and on large agrarian estates. This goes unnoticed in famine historiography as the literature affirmatively views ‘relief’ and ignores the relationship between proprietorial rights and the emergent famine labour regime from the 1860s and onwards.