Peasants, Famine and the State in Colonial Western India

Recent literature has suggested that famines are complex, drawn out, and political processes, rather than sudden, natural phenomena. This book is among the first to examine such a process in detail, by studying poor peasants in Ahmednagar district, Western India, between 1870 and 1884. It does so by investigating their factors of production--land, capital and labor--as well as markets in credit and the cheap foodgrains they produced and, above all, their relationship with the colonial state.