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.
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