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The three new farm laws promulgated by the Government of India in 2020 (now repealed) as agricultural marketing reforms, with the claim that they were aimed at expanding farmers’ marketing choices and increasing their incomes, have triggered massive protests by farmers. These protests have crystallized around two key demands: first, repeal the laws and second, make the minimum support price (MSP) for procuring farmers’ produce a legal right. Given that discussions between the government and farmers’ organizations continue to be at an impasse, it is critical to understand the arguments over the laws and the MSP, and the implications of these arguments for the agrarian future of India.

The article presents a theoretical–methodological proposal to research movements and its connections based on the associations they establish. The first investigation focuses on the transformations of the South African Landless People’s Movement, the second on interactions between Brazilian rural movements and the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform, the third focuses on the transnational ties of the Brazilian National Confederation of Agricultural Workers. We produce an ontological definition of movements and the state as collectives whose existence is defined by continuous assemblages of heterogeneous and unstable elements. Those collectives are not enclosed analytical units, but contingent and contextual. Methodologically, we suggest the observation of the processes in the long term to grasp the continuous constructions of those collectives, even before they reach public expression. Controversies are analytical categories for understanding which elements allow things to take the course we analyze.

This article argues that, till date, a single paradigm dominates the discourse on agrarian crisis and farmers’ movement against the anti-farmer dictates of the Indian state. There is a pressing need for the organic intellectuals of the masses to build an alternative discourse to examine the agrarian crisis and its roots. To this end, the present article reasons that the neoliberal resolution of the agrarian crisis that the authoritarian-corporate nexus has imposed on the farming community will produce mass dispossession and displacement in India. It exposes the misery of traditional consciousness that rules over the current farmers’ movement in India. The article concludes that the agrarian crisis which is actually a crisis of small farmers and agricultural labourers requires modern consciousness for egalitarian and long-term resolution.

This article uses Black liberation theology (BLIBT) as a framework to theorize “the spirit” in the alternative food and sustainable agriculture movement. While BLIBT was formally named by theologian James Cone, it was born of the struggles of Black people in the United States who believed that God called Black people to be free, and God called Black preachers to preach Black liberation. I argue that Black liberation is a grounded vantage point to understand how some Black people might find freedom through food and agriculture. In the first potion of the paper, I make a claim for the importance of studying spirituality in agrarian and food spaces, whether or not a researcher is spiritually inclined. In the second portion of the paper, I delve deeper into Cone’s articulation of BLIBT, and explore how we might begin to theorize it as an agrarian mandate including: a call for an urgent food source, liberation of the individual Black body, community ownership of land, the spirit of Black religious spaces, an emphasis on land reparations, and the freedom to dream. I conclude with a call for why an attention to BLIBT is called for in our present moment.

Between 1975 and 1979, the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) embarked on a genocidal program of sweeping economic, social, and political change. In an effort to modernize Democratic Kampuchea, as Cambodia was renamed, CPK officials forced the entire populace to clear forests; build dams, canals, and reservoirs; and grow rice in an effort to accumulate rapidly the necessary capital for industrialization. In doing so, upwards of two million people died from disease, hunger and malnutrition, torture, and execution. The broad coordinates of the genocide are well-established. To date, however, no scholarship has examined critically the role of non-human animals in the agricultural transformations initiated during the Cambodian genocide. Drawing on two bodies of scholarship, Agrarian Marxism and Animal Geographies, in this paper we examine the role of draught animals in the regime’s plans to build an economy around agricultural expansion and rice production for export. Specifically, we trace the new productive relationships into which Cambodia’s water buffalo and oxen became enmeshed, and the structures of violence within which these animals played an essential part. We find not only that the work of draught animals materially contributed to the CPK’s plans for state-building, but in the process, the new state–animal relationship became an exemplar of the idealized relationship between the CPK and its human laborers. We conclude that the human–animal relationship provides key insights into the mass violence that transpired in Democratic Kampuchea under the Khmer Rouge and to this end encourage future engagement with interspecies relationships in the Cambodian context and in genocide studies more broadly.

Do political institutions moderate the effect of environmental stress on social conflict? We posit that while the frequency of social conflict in developing agrarian states can increase during drought, democratic competition reduces conflict and can facilitate cooperation, reversing this effect. This hypothesis is tested on a sample of all districts in India over a period from 2001 to 2014. The dependent variable captures the number of crimes perpetrated against scheduled castes—so-called “untouchables”—and scheduled tribes—India’s Indigenous groups—during a given district-year. When the effect of drought is moderated using a local electoral competition index, findings show that although droughts increase the frequency of social conflicts where political institutions are weak, they reduce it where political institutions are strong. The results are robust to alternative operationalization choices. Our findings, thus, have relevance both to scholars of the climate–conflict nexus and to policymakers working to address climate change’s effects.

The Charis Community is an intentional community on Episcopal Church property founded in 2014 in Charlottesville, Virginia. What began as a modest agrarian ministry on six acres of land grew into a powerful ministry of antiracist and antifascist community organizing through the white supremacist Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville in 2017. Through telling the story of Charis, I argue that our land-based ministry necessarily drew us into fighting many forms of systemic oppression. As we grew closer to the land and grew in our understanding of our stewardship of the land, the stories the land held—stories of oppression and resilience—shaped our vocation of fighting for justice.

This article considers a range of early twentieth-century projects in which rural space was made subject to an ensemble of institutional forms and practices grounded in emergent urban paradigms. The projects in rural reconstruction I consider here seized on village space and the minds and souls of villagers as their terrain of operation. Rural reconstruction entailed the production of intimate knowledge of the rural population, the development of affective modes of engagement with them, and investments of governmental power not only in state institutions but in more abstract concepts like the ‘rural community’. Many projects were largely propagandistic; their concrete effects were minimal. But rural reconstruction brought urban logics, objects, and institutional forms directly into village milieus in ways that continue to shape how India’s urban and rural areas are conceptualised and operate in relation to one another. If urbanism in India today is deeply enmeshed in agrarian processes, then this article attempts to reverse the gaze by asking how expert knowledge directed towards managing rural change in twentieth-century India depended crucially on emergent urban paradigms.

Drawing on their respective ethnographies of urbanisation in Gurgaon (now known as Gurugram) and thwarted industrialisation in Singur, the authors argue that plots of land owned by smallholders are intermittent commodities. Following Igor Kopytoff’s lead, they focus on commoditisation as a process and adopt a biographical approach to consider the social life of land. The article contends that individually owned plots potentially go in and out of circulation but never get fully commodified, nor do they remain fully non-commodified. With the rising speculative value of land, neither market price nor monetary compensation fully substitutes land ownership. Hence, the landholders express regret and even resentment on having to part with their land. The ambivalence speaks, in part, to the complex attributes of land and the relations of authority, distinction and status associated with it. To maintain their caste-based status, the landowners use land as leverage. They hold on to land or demand better compensation to reiterate the land–caste–power nexus spatially.

The article explores how the unfolding of the Amaravati project in Andhra Pradesh, India, was shaped by the region’s caste-based agrarian social and political formation. It shows how caste structures not only access to land, resources and power, but also the agrarian land transition in the context of a ‘new city’ project. In particular, caste structured the process of land pooling as well as the land market due to the historical embedding of caste in the land governance system. The article outlines two major ways in which caste inequalities and tensions were reproduced and sharpened—the rapid dispossession of Dalits by the unleashing of a speculative land market, and their marginalisation in the land pooling process. These processes are attributed to the institutionalisation of caste within the land revenue bureaucracy and the entrenchment of caste power and ideology within and beyond the state in the Coastal Andhra region, leading to a caste-based ‘land grab’. In response, Dalits mounted opposition to their marginalisation by framing unequal compensation for assigned lands and the alienation of assigned lands as manifestations of caste oppression. The eruption of caste struggles around land in what was supposed to become India’s first ‘fully planned’ city illustrates a key dimension of ‘agrarian urbanisation’ in contemporary India.

While labour linkages and flows between rural and urban India have been studied, there is little discussion on the implications of the agrarian question of capital for the urban. This is particularly important given the intertwining of caste and capital accumulation in India. If there are caste barriers to entry into accumulation in the urban, what does it mean for pathways of diversification of agrarian capital out of agriculture? In this article, we address this question by comparing the trajectories of capital accumulation in the urban by two agrarian caste groups, the Kongu Vellala Gounders (KVGs) in western Tamil Nadu and the Jats in Haryana. We argue that the dominance of specific caste groups in non-agrarian accumulation erects barriers for transition of agrarian capital into the urban. Such barriers are further aggravated by the increasingly adverse conditions under which capitalist farmers produce in rural India and by new barriers to entry posed by globalising market conditions. Finally, we suggest that differences in subnational politics account for differences in transition pathways between the two agrarian castes. We therefore argue that a caste-based reading is critical to understand how caste intersects with diversification of capital from the rural to the Indian urban.

Agrarian urbanisation has gathered pace and intensity in the last few decades after economic liberalisation in India. A faster rate of economic growth has exacerbated the extraction of rural natural resources to supply increased urban demands. At the same time, rural landscapes have been transformed by expanded infrastructure, new industrial ventures, conservation projects and urban sprawl. These processes have been mediated by shifting patterns of caste power and political mobilisation. However, they also seem to have exacerbated social inequality while making historically marginalised groups such as Dalits and Adivasis suffer greater dispossession and livelihood precarity. Case studies from different regions of India reveal both the socio-economic dynamics of regional variation in these broad outcomes of agrarian urbanism, and the cross-regional patterns of environmental degradation, exacerbated inequality and difficulties faced by agrarian society in reproducing itself as an integral part of Indian prosperity and progress.

The future of food and agriculture in Australasia will be defined by multiple social, economic, political and environmental tensions – with climate change and social inequalities playing a central role in the re-imagining of food systems in crisis. This article argues that rural sociology will continue to be well-served by the sociological research into the farming and food industries undertaken by antipodean scholars – especially those from Australia and New Zealand where agri-food scholarship has flourished. Analyses of the future dynamics of rural social/economic change, natural resource management (including land, water and minerals), new relations of work, labour and identity, emerging agricultural technologies, Indigenous and post-colonial politics, and food system governance will benefit from agri-food studies’ insights into agrarian transformation and governance, social and environmental sustainability, health and wellbeing, and the growth of resistance and alternatives.

In the historical course of agrarian transformation in Africa, the reconstitution and fragmentation of the peasantry along the lines of gender, ethnic, class, and racial divisions which facilitate their exploitation remains a central concern in the analysis of the peasant path, of which the exploitation of gendered labor has been a particularly important concern for feminist agrarian theorizations. In contribution to these debates, this article examines the ways in which feminist concerns have shaped, driven, and defined the social and political parameters of agrarian movements in Africa. Even though agrarian movements articulating gender questions are not generalizable as feminist, their concern with social, political, and economic structures of oppression and their approach to gendered oppression as a political question lends them to characterization as being feminist. Through an examination of the changing forms of women-led agrarian struggles, the article shows how women’s responses to the dominant structures and conditions of colonial and post-colonial capitalist accumulation could be characterized as feminist due to their social and political imperatives behind women’s resistance.

In March 2008, the passage of a law to amend grain export taxes in Argentina led to a clash between rural organizations and the national administration. Given its characteristics and political consequences, this clash was one of the most significant events of the Kirchnerist administrations and one of the most outstanding agrarian conflicts in Argentine history. An analysis of it in the context of Argentina’s specific pattern of capital accumulation, in which land appropriation by the industrial sector is significant in explaining valorization capacity, shows how economic determinations affected the political actions of the pertinent social subjects and how the conflict was resolved in favor of the rural bloc. En marzo de 2008, la aprobación de una ley para modificar los impuestos a la exportación de granos en Argentina condujo a un enfrentamiento entre las organizaciones rurales y la administración nacional. Dadas sus características y consecuencias políticas, este choque fue uno de los más significativos durante las administraciones kirchneristas y uno de los conflictos agrarios más destacados de la historia argentina. Un análisis del mismo en el contexto del patrón específico de acumulación de capital en la Argentina, en el que la apropiación de la renta de la tierra por parte del sector industrial ayuda a explicar la capacidad de valorización, da cuenta de cómo los factores económicos afectaron las acciones políticas de sujetos sociales pertinentes y cómo fue que se resolvió el conflicto a favor del bloque rural.

We have explained the presence of heterogeneous winning coalitions in social revolutions. In an overcrowded agrarian society, two almost identical non-productive enforcers, the landed political elite, collude and bargain over transfers with one of the two peasants to contest over a piece of land, as property rights for land are not well defined. In any other scenario, neither the grand coalition nor the coalition of two peasants and one enforcer forms, thereby deposing the other enforcer with positive probability. So, social revolutions never occur. If foreign wars weaken an enforcer, such as in China (1911), France, and Russia, adding one unit of capital makes the coalition of the peasant, the now worker, and one of the enforcers (now an industrial political elite) attractive: The excess labor can work with it; the weaker enforcer retaliates less and the stronger one more, if excluded. However, if the weaker one (the still-landed political elite) proposes first, a grand coalition forms in which he or she gets less than the other members do (desertion). There is conflict among peasants and among landed elites; thus, the concept of a coalition is more appropriate than that of a class.

This article explores some questions arising from recent debates on patriarchy and capitalism. The focus is on the role of women in communist-led peasant movements in India and the implications of such struggles on the project of women’s emancipation. The first section lays out a framework for discussing the interface between class consciousness and the anti-patriarchal project, whereby patriarchy is located within the structural contradictions arising out of the contestations within the process of accumulation. The second section documents the historical context, focusing on the relationship between land reforms and social transformation in semi-feudal and early capitalist contexts, and analyzes the extent to which communist-led struggles are anti-patriarchal in character. The third section turns to the participation of women in the contemporary struggles of both agricultural workers and peasant movements and underlines the new emerging dialectics between women’s and peasant organizations under a neoliberal state and with deepening agrarian distress.

Land ownership and its persistent gap between rich and poor is one of the pressing development challenges in Africa. Access to land has fundamental implications for a poor and agrarian African economy like Ethiopia, where most people depend on agriculture for their livelihood. Empirical literatures suggest that access to land is a cause and effect of poverty—at the same time, the role of poverty status of the household in gaining or limiting access to land has received only a passing attention from researchers. This study investigates the effect of ‘being poor’ on access to land using ordered probit and censored tobit models. Three wave panel data of Ethiopian Rural Socioeconomic Survey (ERSS) collected between 2011–12 and 2015–16 are used for the analysis. The study result confirms that poverty does have significant effect on household’s participation and intensity of participation on both sides of the rental market. It is found that being poor, as compared to non-poor counterpart, leads to an increase in the likelihood of rent-in land by 0.068 hectare and reduce the likelihood of rent-out land by 0.046 hectare at 1% and 5% significance levels, respectively. The tenants are not characterised as economically disadvantaged reflecting the existence of reverse tenancy among rural poor in Ethiopia.

This article examines the interlinkages between rural credit and other agrarian structures. The research is based on primary field survey data which is classified on the basis of labor-exploitation criteria and acreage grouping. The research shows that pre-capitalist relations substantially withered away primarily due to state intervention for land and agrarian reform under the Left Front Government. It also found the operation of market mechanisms (instead of personalized relations) in the determination of informal rates of interest and an inverse association with collateral value. This is reflected in the declining value of the weighted average interest rate (WARI) with ascending class status. Furthermore, it found that the WARI without collateral is lower than the WARI with collateral, the latter being confined only to lean seasons and emergency. An incidence of high interest rate is related to low marketable collateral and vice versa.

B. B. Mohanty, Agrarian Transformation in Western India: Economic Gains and Social Costs. New Delhi: Routledge, 2019, 386 pp., ₹1,495 (hardback). ISBN: 978-0367247294.

In rural areas, agriculture is the primary source of income, and the income depends on the primary factor of production, land. The higher the productivity of the land, the higher the income and general prosperity and lower the levels of poverty. However, it may not always be true if the benefit from the higher productivity accrues to a certain section of large farmers, bypassing the small ones. The study found that, the introduction of irrigation in a poverty-stricken region has promoted advanced capitalist farming and raised the level of output per unit of land. On the other hand, it has led to greater landlessness and inequality among various farm size groups. The benefit is concentrated among few farmers. In this process, there is greater ‘proletarianisation’, which needs to be stopped from worsening the situation further.

Rural non-farm diversification in India is taking up new roles amidst increasing agrarian distress. In this context, two issues have been examined in this paper: first, the nature of rural non-farm diversification, and second, the accessibility of households to rural non-farm employment in the states of Bihar and Punjab. The study is predominantly based on unit level data of the latest round of the Situational Assessment Survey of Agricultural Households (NSSO). Findings suggest that while non-farm activities are largely adopted by landless and marginal land households in both states, there are a few lucrative options available which are being accessed by large landholders in Punjab. Overall, caste, gender and education are dominant determinants that work as barriers to the entry for rural households. The findings recommend that institutional reforms along with public policies should be prioritised towards generating sustainable non-farm livelihood options while eliminating multi-dimensional exclusions in rural labour markets considering regional prerequisites.

Research in political ecology and agrarian political economy has shown how commodity frontiers are constituted through the appropriation and transformation of nature. This work identifies two broad processes of socio-metabolism associated with commodity frontiers: the spatial extension of nature appropriation, via expanding territorial claims to the control and use of natural resources and associated acts of dispossession (commodity-widening); and the intensification of appropriation at existing sites, through socio-technical innovation and the growing capitalisation of production (commodity-deepening). While sympathetic, we have reservations about reducing frontier metabolism to either one or the other of these processes. We argue for more grounded examinations of how non-human nature is actively reconstituted at commodity frontiers, attuned to the diverse and specific ways in which socio-ecological processes are harnessed to dynamics of accumulation. To achieve this, we compare strategies of appropriation in three sectors often associated with the commodity frontier: gold mining, tree plantations and intensive aquaculture. In doing so, we bring research on capitalism as an ecological regime into conversation with work on the industrial dynamics of ‘nature-facing’ sectors. By harnessing the analytical categories of time, space and form adopted by research on industrial dynamics, we (i) show how strategies of commodity-widening and commodity-deepening are shaped in significant ways by the biophysical characteristics of these sectors; and (ii) identify a third strategy, beyond commodity-widening and commodity-deepening, that involves the active reconstitution of socio-ecological systems – we term this ‘commodity-transformation’.

Agrarian environments have to be comprehended as being part of a biophysical and social environment that includes the urban and the nonurban, the arable and the nonarable, and other areas that are integrally linked to the world of agriculture and environment and their allied socioeconomic relations. This article examines the responses of rice biotechnologists located in selected Indian public agricultural institutes under the aegis of the State Agricultural University and the Indian Council of Agricultural Research on questions such as “How is GM (genetically modified) technology perceived by rice biotechnologists and under what limiting conditions is it being pursued in rice biotechnology research? Is there a consensus among rice biotechnologists over the application of GM technology? What are the complexities of the GM policy? and What are the implications of intellectual property rights on GM-based research and how scientists are responding to such institutional norms?”

The question of urbanisation ‘beyond the city’ has generated a lively debate in the fields of urban studies and geography in recent years. This paper brings a key concept from this discussion –‘extended urbanisation’– in conversation with distinct yet related concepts from critical agrarian studies. We briefly review the ‘classic’ agrarian question in order to situate contemporary agrarian questions within the historical geographies of capitalist restructuring since the late-nineteenth century. We then examine a selection of contemporary agrarian scholarship attuned to the interconnectedness of agrarian and urban sociospatial relations to argue that the concept of extended urbanisation and urban studies more generally have much to gain from a closer engagement with this work. To this end, we identify three openings for further analysis: (1) ‘global depeasantisation’ and ‘deruralisation’ as the labour dimensions of extended urbanisation; (2) the co-existence of banal ‘operational landscapes’ with landscapes of high-intensity extraction and agro-industrialisation; and (3) relational periodisations of urbanisation that incorporate successive world-historical ‘food regimes’ and their associated commodity frontiers in order to unearth geohistories of extended urbanisation in colonial and postcolonial contexts. We conclude by rearticulating the ‘right to the city’ in terms of a broader ‘right to space’ as a means of re-centring ongoing struggles against capitalist urbanisation in spaces beyond the city.

A. Narayanamoorthy, R. V. Bhavani and R. Sujatha (Eds.), Wither Rural India? Political Economy of Agrarian Transformation in Contemporary India: A Festschrift for Venkatesh B. Athreya. Tulika Books, 2019, xiv + 241 pp., ₹950 (hardback). ISBN: 978-81-937329-6-0.

The nature and manifestations of the rural and agrarian distress in India point to the disastrous, class-specific nature of neoliberal economic policies. A significant aspect of this process is its spatial dimensions – the various ways through which uneven development has been the cornerstone of the unfolding dynamics of economic growth in globalizing India. The prolonged agrarian crisis, fuelled by neoliberal economic policies, has created a crisis of survival in the rural areas. It has uprooted a class of cultivators and agricultural labourers, who have joined the informal economy as insecure, vulnerable workers.

Farmers’ suicides have been a serious issue over the last three decades in Punjab and also in other states. Much debate has concentrated on the economic factors, especially debt. This article makes sociological observations of Durkheim in the context of Punjab’s society and culture that may help us see the other side of the problem. It argues that debt per se is not the cause of suicide always but that of the agrarian crisis, following the liberal theory of economic and social development. The culture of consumerism is like fuel to the fire.

The paper, a study of Baspur village in Rajasthan, spans a period of five years. It argues that changes in the village economy of Baspur have been guided by a greater integration of the village with the outside world, facilitated by improved modes of communication and transport. Over the years, the increase in non-farm employment, mostly casual and informal in nature in nearby towns, has emerged as a major driver of growth and distribution of income in the village economy. This, coupled with already existing migration streams, considered essential to support livelihood, has greatly reduced the dependence of rural households on agriculture. This is evident in the reluctance of male workers towards preforming farming tasks, a decline in the incidence of land-leasing in the village and a steep rise in farm wages over the years.

This corpus-based discourse study briefly reviews the activities of Boko Haram and the conflict between the nomadic herdsmen and sedentary agrarian farmers of north-central and southern Nigeria. But the study focuses on the representations of the main actors in the conflict and the conflict itself in the Western media and the Nigerian press, and examines the ideological implications of these representations as well as the possible consequences of some particular evaluations of the conflicts for peace and security in Nigeria. The article’s findings show that the constructions of the conflict and the main actors in the Nigerian press are highly sensational, divisive and dangerous. While the foreign press appears much more objective and often constructs the conflict as ‘deadlier than Boko Haram’, the reports still appear to minimize the seriousness of the conflict and construct the actions of the main actors from a perspective that would appeal only to foreign audiences.

Neeladri Bhattacharya, The Great Agrarian Conquest: The Colonial Reshaping of a Rural World, Permanent Black in Association with Ashoka University, Ranikhet, 2018, xv + 522 pp., ₹1195 (hardback).

Examining the changes in production relations in one of the poorest rainfed belts in India, this study, based on field surveys in eight villages in Kalahandi and Nuapada districts of Odisha, unravels the complexities of the transition in agriculture. The introduction of irrigation has resulted in, an increase in yield, wage rates and labour-use per hectare. Comparison between the irrigated and the non-irrigated villages also suggest a drastic reduction in poverty and distress seasonal out-migration. The average household income in the irrigated villages turns out to be more than three times that of the rainfed villages. Thus, irrigation has acted as a key driver of agrarian change, and its role in creating labour demand in agriculture continues to be significant. However, the reduced control of marginalised sections over land, the significance of sharecropping in the irrigated villages, the high share of family labour in total labour-use among the marginal and small cultivators in the irrigated region, and moreover, the continued presence of labour-tying suggest that, the transformation involves several complexities, particularly in terms of the newly emerging labour relations.

Indian agribusiness is being seen as an important arena for creation of employment and income for large sections of India’s rural and agrarian population in the coming years and decades by public agencies, nationally and globally. This is happening in the context of strong agribusiness sectors in the neighbouring countries of China and those in the South-East and East Asia. This article examines the global context of agribusiness competitiveness from an Indian perspective, including the global trade regime and focusses on a few key sectors like dairying, cereals, fruits and vegetables and identifies major factors in their export performance from a value chain perspective. It also examines key global trade policies at the World Trade Organization (WTO) level and Indian agribusiness policy domain to explore ways forward to focus on promising sectors with an appropriate policy and practice steps.

The article makes an effort to locate the emergence of merchant groups in the context of agrarian growth, availability of a marketable surplus, the rise of different types of exchange centres and political enterprises, which must have created their own requirements and facilitated the movement of goods and commodities. It also tries to factor in the transport and communication routes because coastal Odisha had a large hinterland moving up to the Chhattisgarh plains, as also access to southern Bengal and Jharkhand and beyond through the eastern littoral, especially Dandabhukti, among other routes. The rise of transregional states under the Somavaṁśīs and Later Eastern Gangas must have widened the orbit of activity for the regional mercantile groups. Practices and customs followed by the trading communities and their social competence are also investigated. The idea is to situate the developments in the region in the larger context of the issues and debates in the field of ancient and early medieval India. This essay is largely based on inscriptional sources and charts developments up to the fifteenth century.

The contemporary agrarian economy of rural West Bengal is characterized by distinct division of the farming community along caste and class lines. Unlike the belief that the communist regime in the state has significantly reduced instances of caste and class inequalities, the present article based on a fieldwork in Paarhaati village of Memary II block of Purba Bardhaman district argues in favour of the persistence of such inequalities till date. With the help of narratives collected and instances captured in a year-long fieldwork in the village, the present article attempts to bring forth the existence of domination of economically and politically powerful castes of landowners, deprivation of agricultural and landless labourers, formation of factions at the local party level, lack of initiative from the panchayat and increasing intervention of merchants, traders and middlemen that is hindering social, economic and political developments in these regions. The article argues that the ‘change’ proclaimed by the new regime has done nothing exceptional for the contemporary rural economy than the previous regime.

Shubhra Chakrabarti and Utsa Patnaik, eds, Agrarian and Other Histories: Essays for Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri, New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2017, 326 pp. Deepak Kumar and Bipasha Raha, eds, Tilling the Land: Agricultural Knowledge and Practices in Colonial India, Delhi: Primus Books, 2016, 323 pp.

This paper draws from research conducted in Gurgaon, a city which has been transformed from agricultural hinterland to a bustling metropolis over the course of the past 30 years. The aim of this paper is to expand debates on the uneven geographies of urbanisation in India by reconsidering marginalised urban neighbourhoods as infrastructural nodes, wherein the complex and contested work of reproducing urban life is carried out. Extending scholarship on urban infrastructure, social reproduction and heterodox Marxist political economy, this paper highlights the subaltern processes decay and repair which underpin Gurgaon’s rapid urbanisation.

Shubhra Chakrabarti and Utsa Patnaik (eds), Agrarian and other Histories: Essays for Binay Bhushan Chaudhuri, Tulika Books, New Delhi, 2017, xxiv + 328 pp., ₹995.

The article seeks to look at the current organic boom in the state of Kerala as a counter-discourse to the agrarian crisis and the impending issues of food security, food price and health hazards in the state in the wake of the liberalisation policies and World Trade Organization (WTO) agreements. The Polanyan notion of countermovement (1944) is used to unearth Kerala’s agrarian crisis of the 1990s that stemmed up from the commoditisation of agriculture, which ultimately paved way for an agrarian countermovement in the form of organic farming in the late 20th century. It is argued that organic agriculture signals the emergence of an agrarian counter-discourse promoting greater engagement of the farmers from the fringes. The primary data for the article were gathered out of two empirical projects carried out in 2015–2016.

In understanding contemporary rural India, it is important to go beyond rendering the rural as synonymous with villages and agriculture or focusing on the ‘agrarian question’. Given the multiple contradictions that the varied ruralities of India are exhibiting, it may be relevant to locate the rural as being constituted by the triangulated structures of reproduced caste, an economics of neglect, and a politics of rescue. The result of such triangulation is evident in the range of involutions that are manifesting across rural India. These include not only a sharpened differentiation of classes and households, but also forms of separation-integration of key rural institutions and structures, and the erosion of rural citizens. All these have implications for liveability and the nature of democracy in rural areas.

Neeladri Bhattacharya, The Great Agrarian Conquest: The Colonial Reshaping of a Rural World, Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2018, 522 pp.

In an agrarian society, like Ethiopia, where lion share of the population relies on land rights for livelihoods and welfare, access to land is fundamental to be capable of existence as a free and dignified human being. Otherwise, it can also be used a political asset for political control and to impoverish the societal well-being. With the opinion of historical pitfalls and injustices and the tremendous holistic contribution of access to rural land rights in Ethiopia, the constitutional makers of the post-1991 Ethiopia have incorporated the egalitarian concept of ‘free access to land for all needy nationals’. However, the content analysis of the legislation framed aftermath of the 1995 FDRE Constitution reveals the introduction of a policy shift towards land regionalism and market-based land access, because, it has attached regional residency requirement, prioritised to investors and model peasants and introduced land use payment in contradiction to the constitutional rule. Hence, this author argues for the restoration of the Constitutional principle of access to land rights.

Femke Brandt and Grasian Mkodzongi (Eds.), Land Reform Revisited: Democracy, State Making and Agrarian Transformation in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Leiden: Brill, 2018, pp. Iii + 288, ₹49.90/USD 59.00, Paperback, ISBN 978-90-04-36210-9.

The article provides overview of land use decisions in the face of numerous bottlenecks within Nigerian agrarian population. Using a case study, the effects of access to land on land use choice were analysed. A stratified random sampling technique was used to select 104 respondents from 13 communities in Odukpani, Nigeria. A logistic regression model was specified to achieve the analyses. The result of the model was preceded by socio-demographic statistics of the study population. It was found that majority (92.3 per cent) of those with access to land had ownership rights, while 7.7 per cent had only land use rights. However, most (68.5 per cent) of them accessed 0.9 or less hectare of land, only 2.2 per cent had access to up to one or more hectare of land. Land was mainly devoted to agriculture in Odukpani. The logistic regression analyses showed that the size of land accessed has no significant effect on how it is used. However, having land ownership right is 0.1641 times likely to favour land use principally for agriculture than only having land use right. Conversely, having only land use right was 1/0.1641 (or 6.0939) times more likely to cause land use for agriculture than having land ownership right. Interestingly, a unit increase in perceived educational constraint increased the probability of land use for agriculture by 10.9133 times. Similarly, access to credit increased the probability of land use for agriculture by 23.5003 times, while short payback period of the loan received had a retarding effect on land use for agriculture by 0.1763 times. Psychometric scale scores showed that the cost of land (3.97), increase in land speculation (3.79) and conflict of interests by landlord (3.75) were the top three perceived constraints to accessing land in the study population. The study recommends agricultural development policies directed in favour of land access and with a view to tackling the identified constraints.

Domestication has fascinated researchers starting with Charles Darwin who was the first to observe that domestication-related traits are similar across a variety of taxonomically distant domesticated species yet are very different for taxonomically close wild species. The genetic basis of domestication remains to be understood and there are at least three different hypotheses trying to explain the genetic mechanisms underlying domestication phenomenon. This commentary briefly reviews these hypotheses and the existing compelling evidence that mobile genetic elements contribute to the phenomenon of domestication.