Description
Book SynopsisWinner of the 2019 Michael Mitterauer-Prize for best monograph The Peasant Production of Opium in Nineteenth-Century India is a pioneering work about the more than one million peasants who produced opium for the colonial state in nineteenth-century India. Based on a profound empirical analysis, Rolf Bauer not only shows that the peasants cultivated poppy against a substantial loss but he also reveals how they were coerced into the production of this drug. By dissecting the economic and social power relations on a local level, this study explains how a triangle of debt, the colonial state’s power and social dependencies in the village formed the coercive mechanisms that transformed the peasants into opium producers. The result is a book that adds to our understanding of peasant economies in a colonial context.
Trade ReviewRead more about this book in the BBC News article 'How Britain's opium trade impoverished Indians' by Soutik Biswas, 5 September 2019. Read the article on the website of Austria’s radio channel number 1 (Ö1) here. A short radio feature can be found here.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements List of Illustrations and Tables Glossary Units of Measurement 1 Introduction 2 The Creation of a System 2.1 A Chronology of the British Opium Monopoly in India 2.2 A Further Note on Bengal and Malwa: Two Opium Economies Intermingled 2.3 Keystone of Empire 2.4 Opium and China 2.5 Auctions 2.6 The Sudder Factories 3 The Functioning of a System 3.1 The Opium Department: A Centralised Bureaucratic Structure 3.2 The Settlement 3.3 Laws and Fines 3.4 Local Collaboration 4 A Local-Level Analysis of an Opium District: Saran 4.1 Topography and General Aspects Related to Agriculture 4.2 The People of Saran 4.3 Distribution of Land Proprietorship and Tenancy 4.4 Crops 5 The Costs and Benefits of Poppy Cultivation 5.1 Poppy within Bihar’s Agriculture 5.2 Agricultural Operations of Poppy Cultivation 5.3 Who Cultivated Poppies? 5.4 Costs and Benefits: An Assessment 6 The Mechanics of a System: Incentives, Coercion and Dependence 6.1 The System of Advance Payments 6.2 Sarkar—By Order of the Government 6.3 Zamindar—Triadic Relations 7 Conclusion Appendix Bibliography Index
