[There is an] 'historiographic' inequality between Europe and the rest of the world …. [and] until the balance of knowledge and interpretation has been restored, the historian will be reluctant to cut the Gordian knot of world history - that is, the origin of the superiority of Europe.
- Fernand Braudel

Gordian knot. An intricate knot tied by Gordius, king of Gordium in Phrygia. The oracle declared that whoever should loosen it should rule Asia, and Alexander the Great overcame the difficulty by cutting through the knot with his sword.
- Oxford English Dictionary

1.0 The world is a cascade of inequality that is now attracting innovative conceptualization, measurement and research. Historically, inequality has been understood as a result and as a cause of change in economies, societies, cultures, and politics, at every level of investigation -- from global to local, and from longue duree to fleeting moment. Inequality's observed capacity for cyclical self-reinforcement and self-correction and its vulnerability to opposing egalitarian forces have challenged theorists for centuries. Its objective operations remain pressing problems for policy and research. Its discursive powers obstruct inquiry, however, because cultures conflate riches with human value, so that wealth and power appear superior to poverty and underdevelopment. In everyday life, the heights of wealth, depths of poverty, and every unequal position in between come to life in signs of health, beauty, accomplishment, respectability, intelligence, morality, birth, kinship, race, class, gender, ethnicity, religion, and nationality. One's personal position in the world of inequality does more than inflect one's perspective on the topic, it sustains feelings of superiority, confidence, degradation, resentment, striving, anxiety, and need.

1.1 The "'historiographic' inequality between Europe and the rest of the world" that Fernand Braudel refers to above is not as much substantive as it is theoretical. His "Gordian knot of world history" ties up academic routines in the reproduction of non-Western histories as so many moons revolving around the European sun. Today, scholars have shredded every thread in the knot to reveal world history in other light, as a kaleidoscope of unequal, semi-autonomous, inter-connected histories, with multiple territorialities, temporalities, and trajectories, and with powers to contest the future as well as the past.

1.2 Academic routines often retie the knot by presuming that (1) Western wealth and power represent superior Western capabilities, and that (2) global systems of Western activity represent the moving force in modern history. But it will not hold. We know too well that measures of economic development need not reflect accomplishments in the places to which they refer. Bigger systems may not account for change in smaller ones; and if they did, Europe's superiority would be an effect of modern world history, rather than its driving force.

1.3 Instead of tying and slashing knots, however, we can move ahead to study change using modes of historical analysis that open new possibilities. Toward this end, we can fruitfully reconsider the formation of modern agrarian economies in South India. Here, as in most of the world, globalization and Westerners have played active roles that need to be historicized alongside local, regional, and national actors; and this juxtaposition has typically favored the big powers over the small, non-Western, and poor. Other, unexpected histories await discovery.

2. World Space

2.0 One of Braudel's better ideas provides a good place to begin. In The Perspectives of the World, he argues that different geographical expanses or spatial levels exhibit different temporal rhythms, different modalities of historical time. He even asserts, "There are always some areas [that] world history does not reach…."

2.1. We can begin or inquiry with the idea that there is a "world space" that encompasses many other, smaller spaces connected to one another in the temporality of world history. These other kinds of spaces and their histories can be located geographically and temporally inside world space and world history; but their location implies no causality, it is merely analytical.

2.2. We can further follow Braudel by calling the "world economy" that set of powers to move goods and services around from one place in world space to another. Unlike Immanuel Wallerstein and Andre Gunder Frank, we will not presuppose that this world economy has the orderliness of a system, though it might, as various other, smaller economies might also.

2.3. Finding order and causal connections in the world economy is a job for historical study, not theory. One source of order and causality that we need to explore derives from the fact that the various kinds of historical spaces can be "reached" by one another, as Braudel says, through connections that I will call "articulations."

2.3.1 Sites of articulation can be readily visualized as geographical places, which are often urban centers located on networks of mobility, transportation, and communication.

2.3.2 Sites of articulation can also be of other kinds. Elite chronyism and professional associations provide social articulations. Language and literature articulate cultural spaces. In Tamil Nadu, on the southeastern coast of the Indian peninsula, Sanskrit and Tamil literary histories inhabit different spaces and temporalities, and their articulations have changed over time, most dramatically when Tamil nationalism expelled Sanskrit from its territory and made it foreign, excluding Sanskrit erudition from the cultural politics of regional elitism.

3 South Indian Space

3.0 Agrarian regions South India have been part of other kinds of spaces and connected to far-flung places since pre-history. It has never been isolated from a wider world of human mobility. This wider world is a permanent part of South India's historicity.

3.1. And yet, a new kind of wider world, a new kind of world economy, a new kind of space for history emerged after 1500, with global European trade and conquest; and its influence on agrarian South India was marked from the seventeenth century onward. This seaborne world economy is a global economy because it spans the globe; it has the temporality of global history.

3.2 But other of South India's wider worlds were also influential in its agrarian regions and localities at the same time. Regional institutions of authority, entitlement, and taxation that were developed under the Mughals occupied a historical space that extended from southern India to Central Asia and the eastern borders of the Ottoman Empire, in Europe. Circa 1500-1800, South India's early-modern world economy moved simulataneously by land across Eurasia and by sea around the world.

3.3 In 1800, however, many gaps remained in the articulation of Asian, global, regional and local histories of agrarian South India. They were moving separately, spinning in their separate orbits, though connected at critical sites.

3.3.1 The critical sites of articulation were urban centers. Urban sites were forming functional hierarchies never before seen across the entire expanse of the Indian peninsula. Though the Vijayanagar Empire had produced an earlier, temporary, fledgling version of a peninsular central place hierarchy, in sixteenth century, it capital city was destroyed in 1565.

3.3.2 In the eighteenth century, the cities of Hyderabad, Madras, Mysore, Bangalore, and Travancore emerged as the highest-order central places in South India. They became key sites for articulations with the wider world, and they remain so today. Their foundations include elements from their Asian overland and global seaborne world.

3.4 When the East India Company became the paramount power, in 1800, the globalization of South India gained momentum. The Company defined East India around Calcutta; North India around Delhi; Western India around Bombay; and South India around Madras, Bangalore, Mysore, Hyderabad, and Travancore. British rule in India lasted until 1947 and produced dramatic change in agrarian institutions and infrastructure. By 1920, a state regime promoting agricultural development covered South India with a single system of agrarian power, the likes of which it had never seen before. The unity of agrarian history in the peninsula has increased as the local impact of modern development institutions has increased, most rapidly under the government of India, after 1947. Most recently, since 1980, India's structural adjustment has brought agrarian South India firmly in-step with trends in globalization.

3.4.1 The 1961 Census of India defined India's four southern states -- Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu -- as the Southern Zone. These territories were invented de novo in 1956, by grouping villages, taluks, and districts in which speakers respectively of Telugu, Karnakata, Malayalam, and Tamil formed numerical majorities. The new Indian states superseded the erstwhile British Madras Presidency, three huge Native States (Hyderabad, Mysore, and Trivandrum), three tiny Native States (Pudukottai, Banganapalli, and Sandur) and four French possessions (Yanam, Pondicherry, Karikal, and Mahe).

3.4.2.1 South India is thus a modern space, defined during globalization by world powers. Its definite contours emerged abruptly from the fluid landscape of the eighteenth century. The idea of an Indian South had little empirical justification before 1800.

3.4.2.2. Pre-modern routes of mobility had always crisscrossed landscapes running without interrruption from the Gangetic basin south through low Vindhya Mountain valleys into Khandesh and then east down the Godavari River and up the high plateau to Mysore. From Bengal, another major land route ran along the Orissa coast, which Gupta emissaries followed to Kanchipuram. Jean Deloche traces the major routes of inland transportation into a "great Z" of pre-railway India: the top of the Z runs across the Ganges Plain; the vertical line runs south to Berar; and the southern line runs east down the Godavari. His Z-map shows that the biggest inland routes missing the coast, except in Gujarat and on a stretch from Orissa to Tamil Nadu. But the coastal trade connected northern and southern coastal zones as well as Sri Lanka into a single domain of seaborne exchange and mobility that Europeans exploited to the fullest as their base of operations in the Indian ocean. Until 1900, almost all communications between the capital of British India, Calcutta, and its provincial capital in the South, Madras, came by sea,

3.4.2.3 Economic flows followed major routes. Before 1800, Lakshmi Subramaniyam reports that, "The great hundi [letter of credit] operating network of Mughal India that had sprung up in the seventeenth century excluded Madras, but linked Surat with Agra, Delhi, Lahore, Benares, Patna, Dacca, and Masulipatam." This produced a major financial problem for the Company, because Marathas blocked the overland Godavari route. This obstacle made the Company financially dependent on Bombay merchants as it elevated the importance of their greatest ally, the Hyderabad Nizam.

3.4.2.4 Thus Hyderabad (in the Krisha-Godavari interfluve) and Pune (at the top of the Godavari basin) became pivotal sites for the articulation of Company power in the northern peninsula. The Company drew the line between West and South India between them. Railway building in the nineteenth century linked Pune and Nagpure more closely to the north; and Hyderabad continued its close connections to the eastern coast, in British territory.

4. Articulating Spaces

4.0 The historical definition of South India thus represents a tightening of the temporal fit between history in the global economy and in agrarian regions of the Indian peninsula.

4.1 The British Empire was the mechanism for the rapid tightening that occurred in the nineteenth century. British power in India enabled British authorities to channel Indian imports and exports to benefit of British consumers, investors, and manufacturers. Britons did not pay for this. Indian tax payers, particularly land owners, financed the big leap in global economic integration connecting England and India before 1900.

4.1.1 But India's much older commercial dynamism and responsiveness to world markets also helps to explain the motive and means for British empire in India. In the eighteenth century, Indian cotton growers, weavers, and merchants provided most cotton cloth in global markets, though this endeavor involved only a small part of India's agrarian population.

4.1.2 After1800, most Indians became entangled in British plans for Britain's economic development. India's overseas cotton exports declined to almost nothing under British tariff policy. Indians bought huge amounts of Lancashire cloth. The Indian railway was planned in the 1840s and built rapidly after 1857 to link as many Indians as possible with Britain through the modern world economy. During the US Civil War, Indian and Egyptian farmers supplied Lancashire with cotton. A visibly British hand guided this market response, which ushered in a new age of global raw materials supply for industry. A parliamentary commission had foreseen problems in the US South in the 1840s and pushed for policies that would bring more Indian cotton to English factories.

4.2. Agrarian India's upward trend in commercialization, commodity production, and overseas trade in the nineteenth century made it a popular site for the study of the impact of European imperialism. In England, Dadabhai Naoroji wrote the first economic critique of British rule following famines in the 1860s and 1870s. In the 1850s, Karl Marx was writing about agrarian India for the New York Tribune to analyze capitalism. In 1998, Louis Uchitelle indicated the relevance of research on nineteenth century India in a New York Times editorial:

When it comes to globalization, the 20th century is ending on a note of deja vu: The world's economies are roughly as intertwined today as they were in 1913. Two world wars and the Great Depression dismantled the globalization that had been achieved over a 40-year period starting in the 1870s. By 1913, trade and foreign investment, two key measures of global integration, were roughly at the levels that have been reached through a gradual buildup since the late 1950s. The annual rate of increase worldwide for merchandise exports, for example, was 1.7 percent from 1870 to 1913, compared with about 1.3 percent since the 1950s. Foreign direct investment as a percentage of the world's total output reached 9 percent in 1913; in the mid-1990s it was 10.1 percent, up from 4.4 percent in 1960. Other data yield similar results.

5. Cutting the Gordian Knot

5.0. By 1920, South Asia was intellectually globalized, and it is even more so today. When we study the historical formation of agrarian economies in South India, we are also studying the history of globalization

5.2. In this context, my negative argument is that neither globalization nor the formation of modern agrarian economies in South India can be understood accurately as a one-way causal process in which agrarian transformations result primarily from the force of global markets or from the activity of Westerners wielding global wealth and power.

5.3. My positive argument is that the globalization is a long-term historical articulation of global with regional and local economies. In the Indian peninsula, modern agrarian economies were formed around points of articulation between regional histories going back many centuries with a global history of industrial capitalism in the nineteeenth centur.

6. Notes on Method

6.0 I pursue this argument by using a schematically simplified framework of spatial analysis that describes four geographical zones: global, continental, regional, and local. In these zones and at their articulations, we can sketch the spatial temporality of agrarian South India's history inside the world economy.

6.1 "Spatial temporality" refers to the rhythms of historical time that pertain to types of historical spaces, as observed by Braudel.

6.1.1. Prices illustrate this phenomenon. Prices must be measured within a given space. The space must be enclosed to measure its prices. With exterior places excluded, and internal sites subordinated empirically (usually by averaging), the space comes into view as an organized entity. Such control of space represents territoriality. Price trends thus appear in territories within which prices are measured, gathered, and combined. Analytically, we can define territories any way we choose, but historical data comes pre-packaged by territory. I refer to territorial types as "zones."

6.1.2 Local, regional, national, and global prices that pertain to economic life in South India move in different rhythms. Locally, agricultural prices move to local weather conditions that bear most immediately on the harvest. Nationally, they move to the rhythm of monsoons.

6.1.3. The closure and permeability of marketing territories - for example, opening or closing national markets - is regulated to alter the spatial framework within which prices are determined. Globalization is substantially about getting prices to move in a coordinated way within a global space; and national resistance comes from people who want to control the territorial setting within which price movements are determined.

6.2. Like prices, other measures -- many of course being unquantifiable -- need to be defined inside analytical territories. They can be used to depict spatial temporalities in distinctive territories and types of territories, or zones.

6.3. Agrarian South India exists simultaneously in four zones for which we have copious time-series data: global, national, regional, and local.

6.3.1 We can stereotype different methods of history writing according to the zone whose temporalities they assume to be dominant a priori. Global histories take the global zone to be dominant, and the study of globalization is typified by this preference. The same holds for national, regional, and local history

6.4. The formation of modern agrarian economies in South India lies historically at the articulation of these zones, whose temporal rhythms become more synchronized over time, but never collapse into one temporality determined in one zone.

6.5. Articulations among zones constitute material, cultural, and discursive inequalities. Smaller zones are taken to be of a "lower order." Localities are at a "lower level" of analysis. Local dialects and little traditions pertain in villages. In pursuit of upward mobility, people who live in small towns move to higher order urban centers where high culture concentrates. In addition, as we will see, elites are typically formed and sustained at points of articulation. India's urban elite and middle classes are more "in tune" with globalization than poor farmers in villages.

6.5.1. Here are some examples of moments and sites of articulation.

q Today, students from landowning family backgrounds in the southern Karnataka region around the Kaveri River attend Indian government-funded technical schools in Bangalore and work for computer firms that sell their products globally over the internet.

== In Tiruppur town, in Tamil Nadu, industrial entrepreneurs drawn almost exclusively from landed Gounder families run knitwear industries selling on world markets. Fifty years ago, these same families were selling cotton to British mills.

== In 1929, a global Depression reduced farm incomes and profitability in agrarian localities in South India and pushed investors away from farming into industry.

== In the 1820s, a British district administrator used local land taxes to make advances to cotton farmers in the Tinnevelly District of Madras Presidency to increase raw cotton exports to Britain.

6.5.2. Here are some examples of disarticulations.

++ Today, increasing numbers of students in the countryside have no access to English education.

++ Villagers off the road and railway line in Karnataka cannot sell their produce in Bangalore.

++ Andhra Pradesh state police cannot quell a Maoist rebellion by the People's War Group in its Telengana region.

++ International and national investors avoid Kerala, ruled by a Communist government that sustains one of the highest standards of living attained anywhere at its very low level of state per capita income.

++ The poorest regions in South India, most notably, Rayalaseema, attracts no outside business investors at all. (But Rayalaseema does attract charitable investments from a wildly popular religious figure, Sai Baba, who has followers scattered around the world.)

++ Some mountain societies in India appear to be outside world history altogether, though there are few if any of these in South India.

6.6 Keeping all our historical zones empirically "in play" at the same time presents an impossible expository challenge. I concentrate on factors that pertain most directly to the historical formation of contemporary economic conditions in agrarian South India.

7. The Global Zone: Globalization as Territorialism

The global aspect of modern history is well documented and best understood. It emerged initially with Europe's overseas exploits and its first myth might be DaCamoen's La Lusiads, which models Vasco Da Gama's voyage to India on the travails of Roman epic heroes, complete with the machinations of the gods.

Global territorialism -- strategies to make the whole earth into a place that can be controlled, managed, and fought over -- began with 1492. Since then, the faces of most men who have designed the material and discursive structure of the global economy have appeared in various shades of white. People who operate in global networks need to speak European languages, and the global system has changed with advances in Western science and technology. Western armies have conquered globally. Western powers have made vast landscapes into white man's private property, subordinated non-white peoples, and adorned their victories with a mantle of cultural superiority.

Even today, the discourse of globalization includes a pervasive reiteration of Western leadership. The idea that globalization is Westernization derives from real historical experiences that indicate Westerners operate globally with more freedom and influence than others.

7.0. Nations, Continents, and Civilizations

National territoriality emerged in the context of European efforts to make global space European territory. National states emerged inside and in opposition to European empires: in seventeenth century Europe, the eighteenth century Americas, nineteenth century Asia, and twentieth century Africa.

Earlier states had previously consolidated regions of authority and economic integration that would feed national territorialism. But networks that filled out national space and elites who fought to make it their territory entered a new phase when surveyed boundaries appeared on official maps and the boundaries of fully independent states were laid down with international agreements as they first were in South Asia with the division of British India and Nepal, in 1816.

National territories became strictly identified geographically with specific areas of real estate and identified culturally with the particular character of the people inside them. Modern intellectuals divided up the world accordingly, into global (or "universal") theories that were applied to nationally-based empirical studies.

7. 1 Nationalizing Agrarian Space

Indian history came into being with a coherent set of ideas about its territorial form, which determined its epoch chronology. It begins with the assumption that a territory roughly coterminous with "Indian civilization" exists from ancient times. This civilization territory was defined empirically by artifacts of ancient Sanskrit arts, and hence by the Brahman literati, who rose to modern cultural prominence under British rule. Outside the land of Brahmanical culture, other cultures thrived. From this outside world, crossing the borders of South Asia, invaders have come, first, Alexander the Great, but more influentially, medieval Muslims and modernizing Christians; Turks, Afghans, Persians, and Europeans.

Invasions mark the epochs. Every history book will tell you that invaders comprise the motive force behind epochal change. Invading and conquering, Europeans launched modern history with a colonial regime that changed almost everything. In the time of colonialism, nations took modern form, each in their own native civilization territory, and nationalists mobilized to represent natives, to drive out foreign rulers, and to protect native peoples from further invasions. Even today, invaders threaten, from neighboring states and from the wider world of globalization.

This crude outline of history could be applied with minor modifications to other world areas, suggesting how much national history in general is a tale of insiders and outsiders, natives and foreigners, immigration, invasion, impact, and resistance, and thus, essentially territorialized and unequal human identities. It is a short step to political struggles over who is the natural child of the motherland or fatherland, who belongs in national territory, what to do with minorities and aliens, and how best to protect nations from foreigners.

Spatial ideas are thus more important for history than the innocuous term "geography" suggests, because history's places are not merely sites or locations where history happens: embedding human experience, agency, and identity in territory is substantially what history is about. Writing human history into the landscape is what historians do. As history finds the human past inside appropriately bounded spaces, it nourishes territorial sensibilities. And of course, unearthing a people's past in its own territory is a part of the project of nationhood as much as it is an academic endeavor.

Ideas about territoriality -- about spatial identity, control, belonging, inclusion, exclusion, boundaries, protection, border-crossing, aliens, invasions, and such -- and the practices of territoriality that effect social control over geographical space, are themselves historical entities. They change over time and diverge according to context. Until the 1950s, the world map of continents comprised a set of imperial boundaries composed of European territories, their offshoots, subordinates, and adversaries. Changing practices of territoriality during period of national opposition to empire produced changing mechanisms of border definition and boundary enforcement; and changing territorial ideas emerged in the changing instrumental and affective implications of territorial discourse, claims, terms, and phrasing.

7.2 Developing an Agrarian Nation

Nationalism cut the continents into national territories in which the writing of history became professionalized. Inequality became a central feature of national discourse. National leaders opposed imperial hierarchies. The reversal of globalization that Louis Uchitelle reported came from national opposition to inequalities in the world economy, which had been imposed upon nations by imperialism. Free nations waved the flag of national development in opposition to foreign interests.

India's development regime emerged in the mid-nineteenth century. In the 1840s, we can see its beginnings in petitions by critics of the East India Company who opposed excessive, coercive taxation, and, led by Arthur Cotton, lobbied for more state expenditure on public works, particularly roads and irrigation.

In 1869 -- when the Madras Irrigation Commission laid the groundwork for state-mandated, locally-run irrigation work ( called kudimaramat, "village public work") -- Lord Mayo argued for the creation of an imperial department of agriculture in terms that reflect the tone of public discussion:

For generations to come the progress of India ... must be directly dependent on her progress in agriculture .... There is perhaps no country in the world in which the State has so immediate and direct an interest in such questions .... Throughout the greater part of India, every measure for the improvement of the land enhances the value of the property of the State. The duties which in England are performed by a good landlord fall in India, in a great measure, upon the government. Speaking generally, the only Indian landlord who can command the requisite knowledge is the state.

Nationalists used Mayo's argument against his government. They argued that Indian prosperity had become poverty under the British. Famine deaths had increased. Excess taxation had ruined agriculture. Land settlements had punished investors. Deindustrialisation had forced workers onto the land. State expenditure for improvement was paltry and the government's claim to be working in the interest of the people was at best hypocritical.

India's national agrarian scene became a ground for debate, research, and political action. State institutions and urban intellectuals invented modern sciences of development. Radhakamal Mukerjee textualized the field of Indian Economics, in 1916, beginning with a model of a traditional Indian village economy which had been disrupted by heavy tax demands, private property laws, voracious money lending, and capitalist commercialism -- all imposed by the British. India's traditionally stable, just, villages were ripped apart by foreigners, who nonetheless brought India modern ideas and technologies that needed to be adjusted to the needs of the people. An honorable past became an image of the future.

By 1930, an official agrarian history informed national debates, and ever since then, the writing of agrarian history has meshed national politics. Disruptions caused by the Great Depression accentuated Jawaharlal Nehru's a radical turn as he became President of the All-India Congress Committee, declaring,

the great poverty and misery of the Indian People are due, not only to foreign exploitation in India but also to the economic structure of society, which the alien rulers support so that their exploitation may continue. In order therefore to remove this poverty and misery and to ameliorate the condition of the masses, it is essential to make revolutionary changes in the present economic and social structure of society and to remove the gross inequalities. (italics added)

By 1947, Nehru could articulate a vision of national agrarian history that was etched into the Congress party platform and a national development agenda:

Though poverty is widespread in India, it is essentially a rural problem, caused chiefly by overpressure on land and a lack of other wealth?producing occupations. India, under British rule, has been progressively ruralised, many of her avenues of work and employment closed, a vast mass of the population thrown on the land, which has undergone continuous fragmentation, till a very large number of holdings have become uneconomic. It is essential, therefore, that the problem of the land should be dealt with in all its aspects. Agriculture has to be improved on scientific lines and industry has to be developed rapidly in its various forms ... so as not only to produce wealth but also to absorb people from the land.... Planning must lead to maximum employment, indeed to the employment of every able?bodied person.

7.3 Agrarian Transformation as National Biography

From 1920 until roughly 1980, national modernization and development were effective tools in the unification of national territory. But before and since, an immeasurably more powerful tool has been the ideology of "civilization," which has been used to reinforce and also to attack national regimes struggling to develop and modernize.

National histories represent themselves inside civilization territories which they model on themselves. All details and specific conclusions of specialized historical research are organized in a big picture that includes a standard set of assumptions about the territoriality of each national heritage. By and large, historians do not interrogate these spatial ideas. South Asian history uses the same set of ideas as history elsewhere. South Asia sits within a world of bounded civilization territories; it participates in modern world transformations that guide historical research in general. Ironically, national uniqueness has the same genealogy everywhere.

Nationalized civilization history is all the more compelling because it underlies modern transformation theory as developed by Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Foucault, and many others. Following in their tracks, historians discuss how and to what extent South Asia's civilization-space was transformed during its colonial rite of passage -- analogously to Europe, China, Africa, the Americas, the Middle East, and Latin America -- from a situation characterized by one set of civilization forms to another; or, broadly speaking, how nations moved from tradition to modernity, or from feudalism to capitalism.

The bipolar conceptual form of modern transformation theory is in turn based on older assumptions about civilization difference, which posit the occurrence of a transformation in Europe that could not happen elsewhere. A theory of contrast between Europe and the rest of the world plays out empirically in historical research on particular times and places.

The historical construction of national biography employs two scenarios that situate nations in separate civilizations, so that they all can experience, each in their own way, a singular world history of modern transformation

Before modernity, there was a time of tradition. This vast, vague string of centuries witnessed only one structural transformation comparable to the rise of modernity, that is, the rise of ancient civilizations. Post-antiquity and feudal history are relatively changeless; they sit neatly inside intersecting civilization histories; and they form the context for modern transformations. Their relative changelessness makes the rise of modernity history's central preoccupation. The problem of rapid, singular, and universal modernity stands out like a sore thumb; and question of its origin finds an obvious answer: modernity arose in Europe and spread around the world.

Traditional civilizations underlay national cultures that struggle against foreign domination. Geographically, civilization-territories contain all the elements that define tradition and explain the character of modern transformations in each national history. Civilization-territories change shape -- as during Muslim and European expansion -- but retain their essential character across transitions to modernity. Thus they define the character of nations. History operates within assumed geographical boundaries, as historians give nations traditional roots and narrate national histories of modern transformations. Every nation has by now obtained ancient traditions and a personal experience of modernity, and national cultures necessarily promote the theoretical permanence of civilization territories in historical studies.

8. Regions: Large, Small, Nearly (In)visible, Ever-Shifting

There may be no escaping the idea that every nation, living inside its own civilization territory, came into its own during a global rite of passage into modernity that was led by Europeans. The coherence and fascination of this idea seem endless. Durkheim might say it provides stability in a world of national states that all need to find individual cultural coherence within a shared origin myth.

There is, however, a disjuncture between a national zone of territoriality and a regional zone that is much older, ambiguously shaped, shifting in size and visibility, and anathema to both national and global territorialism. In social and economic history, recovering the regional past is a critical task. In South Asia, it is also critical for political history, because popular mobilization and new party formation take distinctly regional forms.

Mapping economic and social inequality reveals regions with various degrees of clarity; and regional visibility is a problem for historical analysis in its own right. In general, it can be argued that because information systems sustain institutional power, their data obscure those features of reality that institutions do not want to see. Amorphous regions are one of these features. National and global information systems do not like to document shifting regional forms inside or encompassing national territories. The visibility of historical regions other than the fixed, official regions that are sanctioned by national states would appear to vary inversely to the power of state regimes.

Regions bigger than national states seem to be least visible when states have the most power to control their own borders informationally, that is, to construct national discourse inside fixed, national ideas and data about territoriality. Small, poor countries would seem least able to contain their citizens' sense of the world inside their own borders. Big, rich countries would find it much easier. This is certainly the case in South Asia, where the intelligentsia in the smaller countries are most concerned with South Asia as a region. In India, South Asia is constructed primarily as a set of territorial problems on the border. India resembles the US in this respect, as Bangladesh resembles Mexico.

8. 1. Disarticulated Regions, (In)visible Territories

The regional zone is officially disenfranchised but most salient for history where poverty and inequality are most blatant. In discussions of globalization, national economy history, and the modern world economy, regions of inequality rarely make an appearance.

Regions disarticulated from national institutions appear analytically anomalous; they can also be hard to find using official data. For example, the regional territory of the US political economy obviously exceeds US national borders. In the nineteenth century, US territory expanded across the Americas, took land from Mexico, and then continued to expand across the Pacific and Caribbean. The region of US state and economic power now includes most of Latin America. But these regional dimensions are invisible in education. "Civics" stops at the border.

Internally, too, regions that describe inequalities in the US political economy are obscured. This regional zone is disarticulated from the national zone; its inhabitants, incoherently represented in national politics; and its geography, invisible on official maps. Ethnic regions are of this type. Urban regions are also. Both are "economic" but they are also marked by social and cultural identities and inequalities.

Regionally, US income inequalities are increasing in a manner that concentrates more poort people in poor places. Growing islands of urban poverty are surrounded by wealthy suburbs in metropolitan regions that often cross state lines and typically implicate several counties, thus defying formal representation.

US national poverty statistics concern constituencies and do not display regions of wealth and poverty. Consider Philadelphia. US Census data on the population below the national poverty line in Pennsylvania counties show Philadelphia as an outlier with a much higher percentage of poor residents than all but two other counties. But if we calculate each county's poor population as a proportion of the state total, we find that Philadelphia has more than ten times the proportion of poor Pennsylvania residents than the next poorest county, and 20-30 times more than all the other counties. Philadelphia is not only a poor place, but a uniquely poor place in the state from which it must seek funds for basic services.

Public investments are most needed where local funds to sustain them are least plentiful. This is clearly a viscious circle. But the neediness of the Philadelphia region is buried in official data. Making matters worse, the Philadelphia region extends into New Jersey and Delaware, making it even more difficult to see empirically and impossible to represent politically.

This is an example of regional zone disarticulated from the national zone. Instead of a region, the national information system depicts localities of poverty, often called "pockets" to further ghettoize them.

We get some sense of recent regional history by combining snap-shot Census data with serial data on US income disparities. Assuming that wealth and poverty concentrate spatially -- for instance, in the inner city and suburbs, respectively -- we can imagine a recent trend of territorial polarization inside the US that echoes a trend its hemispheric region. Since the 1960s, income trends show "general stagnation, with a slight downward bias, for poor and middle-income households," and (2) "strong growth at the high end." Something in the vicinity of 95% of the benefits of economic growth in the last 25 years have apparently accrued to the richest 5% of the US population. Disparities between North Philadelphia and adjacent suburbs resemble disparities between the richest and poorest places in this hemisphere, and also disparities between the richest and poorest localities inside South Asia.

8.2 Lessons from Western Europe

European data reveal more regionally explicit patterns of inequality. In 1957, Gunnar Myrdal drew the following conclusions from annual Economic Surveys of Europe; they seem to be equally valid in the 1970s and 1990s.

(1) " …in Western Europe, disparities of income between one region and another are much wider in the poorer countries than in the richer ones. If we use such a simple measure of regional inequality as the proportion of the total population of a country living in regions where the average income is less than two-thirds of the national average, we find that this proportion amounted to only a few percent in Great Britain and Switzerland, to some ten percent in such countries as Norway and France, and to about one-third in Italy, Turkey, and Spain."

And

(2) "… while the regional inequalities have been diminishing in the richer countries of Western Europe, the tendency has been in the opposite direction in the poorer ones."

Myrdal explains these observations by arguing that the "spread effects" of economic development will be stronger and more comprehensive in richer countries. Higher levels of education, better transportation, and more mobility for opportunity-seekers in richer national economies tend to spread prosperity more evenly. On the other hand, "backwash effects" that occur when investors to abandon or ignore places of poverty will be stronger in economies that are poor, not growing, or regressing economically.

Thus we can expect that the poorer a national economy is, the greater its regional inequalities will be and the more visible rich and poor regions will be. National poverty implies greater disparities between rich and poor places. Greater disparities would be of greater concern to national elites, because they would foster schisms between rich and poor constituencies and between social groups concentrated spatially. If ethnic, religious, and other sources of social solidarity are packed into polarizing rich and poor places, struggles for resources can get nasty.

Broadly speaking, struggles for resources in the modern world economy entail three forms of power that are relevant here. Political organizations represent territorial constituencies. Social solidarities mobilize to push and pull for their own people on their own turf. Market forces move assets among buyers and sellers from one place to another.

Official state institutions are influenced by all these forms of power, and cannot, in practice, rise above them. Practically speaking, representing a nation means representing all its variously empowered constituents. What we can call "state favoritism" can thus take various territorial forms. The state might be unevenly influenced by territorialized parties or factions, or by the social influence of people from specific kinds of territories, or by market considerations that would tend to favor some places over others.

These forms of power might be exercised interactively to accentuate or to mitigate regional coherence, visibility, and inequality. Myrdal argues that forms of power other than "the free play of market forces" would need to be exercised in order to lessen regional inequalities; because, as he says, "There is a tendency inherent in the free play of market forces to create regional inequalities, and this tendency becomes more dominant the poorer a country is …."

8.3 Regions in the World Economy

Left to itself, the market would seem to increase territorial inequalities by various means. Within the modern world economy, we can see this at the articulation of global, national, regional, and local territories, in each of which zone the market favors sites of opportunity. Markets would tend to accentuate territorial inequalities around points of articulation, as investors looking around the world, or the nation, or the region would tend to locate their investment in places with higher potential. These places would be those best designed, constructed, organized, or endowed to attract investors; they would be places with infrastructure to foster horizontal linkages within a surrounding territory and to foster vertical linkages with wider zones within which capital is moving around looking for sites for investment.

Historically, globalization has proceeded by the production of networks of mobility among favored sites of articulation among bigger and smaller circuits of investment. Today, we can see similarities of conditions among favored sites globally, nationally, and locally. These sites concentrate in more prosperous regions. The spread effect of investments spread more evenly and widely in richer countries than in poor ones, as they do in richer regions inside and outside national borders.

Thus the region of Europe has expanded to embrace investors in richer countries who have problems incorporating political demands from poor regions expressed in the European Union through its transnational institutions. But market networks also move along lines of mobility among favored sites, leaving less-favored places undervalued in regions of relative poverty. In the same way, parents living in Philadelphia suburbs are more likely to spend money and educate children in a prosperous place rather than in poor parts of Philadelphia. The same logic would lead upwardly mobile investors in Philadelphia to leave their neighbors behind. The poverty of West Philadelphia thus becomes a problem for the University of Pennsylvania, as the poverty of North Philadelphia is for Temple University.

The territorial logic of markets led Albert O. Hirschman to advocate "induced investment" during "uneven development," lest the option of "exit" steadily win over "loyalty" and "voice" in market-deprived locations. Political and social forces can be mobilized to induce investment and to mitigate the locational favoritism expressed by markets when left to their own devices; but these forces need to be institutionalized and sustained to do this work.

More recently Francois Perroux has argued that spatial inequalities in development need to be taken into consideration by planners, and Arthur Morris up-dates Perroux by saying that in the same way that development moves ahead unevenly in time, in what he calls "waves," "it also occurs in a lumpy form over geographical space."

Specifically, it tends to be highly concentrated, especially over the last 200 years, in urban-industrial nodes. Through a series of positive feedback looks, these nodes tend to be self-maintaining over a period. New industries are attracted to them because of a variety of advantages in provision of goods, information and services. In some cases, a diffusion outwards of their dynamism may occur, and in others the impulse of development is retained in a single centre, but the central fact is the clustering and cumulative nature of development changes.

A recent surge in research on inequality has been stimulated by observed territorial effects of market-led development at time when countervailing forms of power are being de-emphasized within the international development regime. Empirical studies embraced by the World Bank have reached conclusions like those of Myrdal and Hirschman in the 1950s, though they come from a different direction. They indicate that inequality and growth exhibit inverse relations, especially "when research examines the impact of asset distribution on growth." The general finding is that "…the more equal the distribution of assets such as land, the higher growth rates tend to be." Thus, lower growth rates accompany more unequal asset distribution, especially in land.

Though this research would seem to argue in favor of land reform, The Bank concludes more cautiously that "poverty reduction in many countries being slow at best, the scope for public policies to have a poverty-reducing impact through redistributive effects - from safety nets to social expenditures - needs to be examined." Of greater concern to The Bank is "the impact of inequality - independent of the poverty level - on health outcomes, such as morbidity or mortality rates, or as a cause for violence."

8.4 Agrarian Regions

The inequalities of most concern for global development discourse are national inequalities. But national studies using national data, such as those in the US, obscure the manifold operations of territorial inequality. We need to move historical studies beyond national preoccupations to investigate regions that form and change inside and outside national boundaries and imaginations.

Market forces combine with political and social power to create shifting patterns of regional inequality. The result is more complex than historical geographies based on national state boundaries convey. Global forces articulate with regional and local territories to influence inequalities inside national boundaries. Territories of social and economic power take shape around points of articulation among global, national, regional, and local zones. Regions arise inside and around national states. Historically, maps are always in motion; so assuming that nations lock history in place or that globalization eliminates territoriality is quite mistaken.

Agrarian history moves beyond the study of agriculture as one sector of a national economy that is experiencing a transition to modernity or facing the challenge of globalization. On useful approach is to study agrarian territories forming at the articulation of global, national, regional, and local zones. Such territories have visible but shifting geographical contours over time. They never adhere completely to the dictates of any one zone. As a consequence, their history needs to be freed from the constraints of national histories and relocated within a world history of agrarian territoriality.

It is also useful to think of territoriality and inequality together as structuring forces in agrarian territories. Controls over space constitute territory and institutionalize inequality at the same time. We can see this process at work at the local, regional, national, and global scale of analysis, and we can strive to develop a shifting scale of perception that allows history to move across zones and to focus particularly on modes and sites of articulation. Using this strategy, we can see the local face of a global economy where populations are descending below poverty lines during periods of economic growth, and losing access to clean water, sanitation, employment, education, housing, and other basic needs as asset accumulation accelerates.

9. Localities and Inequalities

9.1 In the Eye of the Nation

In the 1930s and 1940s, Nehru expressed a vision of agrarian India that would guide plans for the nation's future. Despite many changes in India's governance since then, the basic tenets of his vision continue to guide national development -- in fact, not only in India but also in other South Asian countries and, with variations, in most poor countries that emerged after 1945 from colonial rule.

** First, "poverty and misery" are both widespread and essentially rural. They have deep roots and must be primary target of development programs. Transforming and transcending India's agrarian structure is critical for national progress.

** Second, "gross inequalities" have a double cause: "foreign exploitation" and "the economic structure of society." When foreign rule is replaced with native government committed to helping rather than exploiting the nation, state support for inequality at all levels disappears.

** Third: the new regime will "make revolutionary changes in the … economic and social structure of society … to remove the gross inequalities." The national state imagines a direct, benevolent relationship between itself and people in the countryside, to reconstitute post-colonial governmentality, politics, development, and social transformation, all at once.

Though Nehru's administration introduced national policies labeled "socialist," it understood India's agrarian economy as being fundamentally market-based. Agricultural development programs were founded on commitments to protect and expand landed property rights and state support for market-driven productivity increase in farming.

9.2 In the States

India's constituent states provided most funding and administration for agricultural development, as their territorial predecessors had done. State projects continued to stress (1) infrastructure, especially irrigation, electricity, marketing, communications, and transportation; (2) finance, through credit, price supports, and subsidies on everything from food to petrol and electricity; and (3) science, especially in irrigation, seeds, fertilizer, and farming practices.

In addition to being administrative units, however, Indian states are electoral territories power within which agricultural interests pursue their own goals. These competing interests typically pit professional and semi-professional financiers against land owners. They had worked hard to expand their influence under British rule, and broadly speaking, small land owners won battles for state favoritism in agricultural development. Government became hostile to merchant middlemen, moneylenders, and rentiers in the countryside. Substantial village land owners who strive to control local labor, credit, and capital markets came into their own politically with the institution of a universal franchise in the 1950s, when their influence on votes paid serious dividends. For local land owners, it was good news indeed that the Planning Commission and all the economists construed Indian farmers as poor but ambitious rational actors who worked in villages under material and social constraints which the state could remove to liberate the nation's productive power.

Material constraints were to be lifted by public support for private investments in agriculture. State projects relied increasingly on international funding as they grew rapidly under Five Year Plans; and after 1980, they were enhanced by domestic and international non-governmental organizations. Since 1980, increasing ideological emphasis has been placed on private sector funding; but locally, private investors have always been dominant. All official economic thinking in India has always assumed the fundamental importance of private, local investors. Nehru's old "socialist" regime and India's new "post-socialist" regime are essentially the same in this respect: they seek to remove "substantive obstacles to an unleashing of the forces capable of generating economic development, both inside and outside agriculture."

Local farm interests have been strengthen over the decades since 1947 by a broad pyramiding of political power in India, that is, by the building of state and national governments on a wider and broader base of local participation. It is music to the ears of local landed interests when progressives, populists, and international development agencies valorize "local initiatives." The local is the crucial zone of agrarian political economy. Articulations here make all the difference.

Because Indian states, districts, taluks, and villages are administrative territories and also electoral constituencies, the Congress Party was able to articulate the national with the local through a combination of development activity and political patronage during the 1950s and 1960s. But after Nehru's death, regional parties and factions adapted this strategy to whittle away Congress power. South India took the lead. Kerala and Tamil Nadu were permanently non-Congress states by 1970; and soon after, regional Congress factions controlled Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. Today, no South Indian states is ruled by Congress. All the "regional parties" in Indian states have regional roots within states, in localized territories dominated by particular social groups, among whom land owners are most prominent.

In the context of this historical setting, we would expect that "social constraints" to economic development to be construed by government very narrowly. This is indeed the case.

· First and foremost, government targeted "feudal forms" of landlordism legalized under the rubric of zamindari, which were slowly eliminated in all the states, with due attention being paid to congenial exit options and loopholes to cushion the blow for the erstwhile agrarian elites, many of whom continue to be politically influential.

· Secondly, the publicly maligned social institution called "caste" was targeted for reform. In its local and regional form, the elimination of jati (caste ) was clearly impossible and never really contemplated by anyone. But in national and international discourse, "caste restrictions" and "caste mentalities" were seen as obstacles to free association, market activity, and economic rationality. Caste categories were duly removed from Indian census operations in 1951. It became illegal to bar entry to any public institution, including temples, on the basis of caste. The most deprived castes and tribal groups were put on "schedules" in the constitution to allow the state to engage affirmative action programs for their "uplift" through reservations in legislative bodies, schools, and government employment.

9.3 In Villages

India's official local unit is "the village." State-defined villages became elemental electoral and administrative territories. Although village identities and practices of various kinds have long histories, national regimes in South Asia re-constituted the village as the intimate domain of the nation's rural social order to be modernized through the market economy and protected by state politics.

Scholars have also naturalized the village in theories of culture and modernisation. Official villages have been micro-units of census enumeration since the founding of British rule, when India became understood as "a land of villages." Indian Economics was based on theories of traditionally self-contained village economies. Economists have conducted village studies to trace development since the 1920s. Anthropology adopted the village as a research site in the 1950s.

Official preoccupations with village stability date back centuries and still pervade governments as well as NGOs promoting political order along with growth and welfare. By 1972, however, strains in the village were obvious, and a Home Ministry report concluded that "the persistence of serious social and economic inequalities in the rural areas has given rise to tensions between different classes .... which may lead to a situation where the discontented elements are compelled to organise themselves and the extreme tensions building up with the 'complex molecule' that is the Indian village may end in an explosion."

9.4 In Agrarian Regions

Historically, however, economic change and social conflict have long gone hand-in-hand. Because resource allocation can never be accomplished through the market alone, changing the terms of social allocations typically provokes conflict among social groups that possess solidarities for organizing group efforts to control resources. Jati provides such a solidarity, which is minutely differentiated and pervasively active in local market economies.

In agrarian South India, jatis or caste groups can be seen as social extensions of kinship, through which assets of all kinds are controlled by individuals in families. Caste identity and status are symbolic assets in the social process of capital accumulation. Caste has never hindered the growth of commercialism or stymied market-led growth; it remains a potent means for controlling economic resources inside the market economy. A jati is like a diffuse clan or lineage, or a micro-ethnic group in the social division of labor and in formations of social power.

Although widely deployed in politics and social discourse, caste is most effective economically in localities, where people know one another and know where everyone stands in the local order. Many caste territories have been produced historically, over long periods of time, by migrations and settlement strategies, forming a vast patchwork of caste micro-regions that do not appear on any official maps, although they are visible to some extent in the older census data and everyone in South India knows where they are. Eliminating caste from the Indian Census in 1951 erased local and regional caste territories from acadeic understandings of the agrarian economy, but not from farming comunities, agrarian polities, or economic life.

In many small regions of caste social economy, specific collections of castes have old, established patterns of interaction with one another. Historical records indicate that the creation of these patterns was not a peaceful process; it involved a lot of fighting for land and for power in the tiny agrarian polities that dominated South India until 1800; but the process was largely complete by the early nineteenth century, by which time, all agrarian caste micro-regions in present-day South India had been formed. Landed groups in each region then fought for and acquired private property rights under British rule. As we will see, some violent fights for caste power in little regions continue even today.

· The oldest of these little regions date from the first millennium. They expanded along river valleys and are centered on irrigated farming settlements, where rice is the major crop.

· Another set of caste regions began forming around 1200, in higher, drier areas up-river and between river basins. Some localities here were completely dry, growing only millets, pulses, and dry cash crops like cotton. Others had irrigation from wells and tanks built by embankments across drainage routes, so they could grow rice and garden crops, like chillies and tobacoo.

· Another "mixed farming" variety of caste social territory expanded across the foothills of mountains and mingled with areas of tribal, non-caste society.

The expansion of agriculture over the centuries spread geographically outward from localities of landed caste control inside small agrarian territories. South India's ecological diversity -- its environmental inequalities -- (Table 1) and its constant entanglement with networks of coastal, overseas, and inland trade sustained complex commercial economies in these small regions. Politics in the royal domains of pre-modern kings sustained micro?regions of local elite, dominant caste power and also organized the labor that transformed open land into farm land, stimulating commercial farming and manufacturing. Migratory movements that opened political frontiers also opened production frontiers. A horizontal partitioning of the landscape divided territories of dominant caste land and labor control, as vertical transactions of fealty and ascendancy generated capital for investment and powers to deploy productive labor.

Thus there is no practical distinction between polity and economy in the local history of caste on the land; no bifurcation between transactional logics of caste and commerce. The horizontal and vertical transactions that formed caste groups also generated commercial energy. Productive powers deployed within spatially partitioned domains of labor control became linked by transactions in tribute and trade to one another and to distant places in the widening world of the global economy.

Table 1 Production Regimes in Pensinsular India: General Characteristics

Regime	Rainfall(mm/yr)	Irrigation Type	Key Food Products	Key Cash Crop	Landscape Type
Pastoral and Dry Farming	<500<700	wells	millets, animals	cotton	driest plateau dry forest
Dry Farming	>500<800	wells	millets, pulses	cotton oilseed	dry plateau savannah
Mixed Dry-Wet Farming	>500<1250	tanks, wells	millets, rice	cotton oilseed	riverine plateau coastal plain
Wet Farming	>1000	tanks, rivers, dams	rice	rice, garden crops	coastal plain
Wet Forest	>1250	rivers, dams	rice	fruit, garden, plantation	mountain coastal plain

9.5 In Agrarian Capitalism

British rule, the modern state, Indian independence, and subsequent change in the national and world economy altered the political economy of agrarian localities. Patterns of conflict and inequality changed as agrarian capitalism took distinctive social forms in small regions of caste social order.

Struggles that the Home Ministry noticed in 1972 had a long history indeed. They involve the articulation of powers operating at various levels of scale and in institutions defined in all four historical zones. They thus cannot be said to have one point of origin. They cannot be said to be caused fundamentally by global, national, regional, or local trends. They operate in all four zones simultaneously. Their local conduct is visible in historical documentation but their wider origins also demand attention.

9.5.1 The privatization of property.

Private property in land is typically taken to be the hallmark of transitions to capitalism. In South India, land was privatized in the nineteenth century, under British rule. The British have been duly assigned the primary causal role in this epochal change. But the division of village lands formerly controlled by local collectivities into individually owned parcels was propelled in addition by locally powerful landed families. Intense local competition for land inside the cultivated territory of villages and also for land open for grazing and other uses explains not only the intensity of legal struggles over land rights but also the Company's capacity to charge outrageously high rates of land tax where market conditions made paying these rates very difficult.

Declining prices during the period 1820-1854 coincided with struggles among locally powerful families to buy private land rights from the state; this generated great loal animosity toward state officials;it also provoked coercion and brutality by state officers who had to deliver land revenue to their superiors to maintain their position. In the 1840s, the Madras Torture Commission duly blamed "native officials" for brutality and corruption in revenue relations with local farmers and proposed to further Anglicize the revenue bureaucracy, to lift revenue oficials out of local entanglements.

Rising agricultural commodity prices, after 1850, made buying land rights much easier; local "resistance to the colonial state" subsided into the standard capitalist pattern in which politically organized property owners seek to lower their tax bill, and tenants seek to lower their rents and secure their tenure. Lowering taxes, rents, and interest rates became the most popular plank for the Indian nationalist movement in the countryside.

Eliminating landlordism and spreading private property rights among the largest possible population of land owners became the most popular feature of land reform in independent India (also in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka). South India again took the lead with its vast population of locally land-hungry small holders, who wield predominant power in state politics in all the states as well as being the centerpiece of agricultural development.

9.5.2 Crop Commodification

The increase of cash cropping is the standard measure of growing agraran capitalism. Rice, cotton, pulses, tobacco, chillies, vegetables, oilseeds, spices, and many other crops were produced for the market in favored localities throughout South India long before 1800. Subsistence farming was initially most commodified in places with good irrigation, good cotton soil, and good access to trade routes and merchant capital. All inputs for India's vast output of cloth for global markets in the eighteenth century had come from agriculture. The revolutionary trend after 1800 was not the creation of a market economy, but rather its spreading and deepening in farming localities. As in other parts of the world, this spread was uneven and left the poorest places to subsist outside commodity markets.

Selling more on the market was necessary for buying rights to land, and commercial farming thus bomed after 1820, despite falling prices, agravating heir decline. After 1854, a boom set in that lasted until the Great Depression, and picked up again after 1935.

After 1870, commercial crops expanded at the expense of crops without wide markets, especially millets, whose acreage declined steadily, robbing poor people in poor localities of local supplies of cheap, nutritious food. In some areas, millets became fodder crops for animals rather than food for the poor. Urbanization increased commodity markets for the higher-priced food grains, although the workforce in agriculture did not decline compared to other sectors until 1950. The profitability of commercial farming in independent India has been further improved by government subsidies and by the exempt status of farm profits from income tax.

Financing commodity crops has been a steady source of conflict in the countryside. Struggles over tax rates invoked commodity prices. Local lore records pervasive conflict between farmers and money lenders. Merchant buyers and brokers were typically objects of farmer animosity. Food shortages provoked violence against grain merchants. In this light, rather than thinking of India's food price subsidies and government distribution systems as market constraints, it may be more useful to see them as investments urban industry and in law-and-order in the face of dramatic volatility in seasonal output and food availability.

Regions that do not feed themselves in South India get food from other regions, and state institutions provide infrastructure for such food transfers, allowing more commercial crop specialization. A dramatic example is the dry interior Telengana region of Andhra Pradesh, which has poor soils and poor irrigation but witnessed a steady increase in commodity crop production in the face of a 250% increase in its urban population during the period 1901-1961. Most of this growth surrounded its capital city, Hyderabad, which has more than 50% of the state's urban population. Outside this one domineering city, most places classified as "urban" lack even basic urban amenities, and the region as a whole was running a food deficit of 50,000 ton annually in the 1960s, which was "easily covered by the supply of rice from the rice surplus coastal Andhra."

9.5.2 Commodification of labor.

It is sometimes said that making labor into a commodity is particularly difficult in agriculture, and it seemed particularly so to early analysts of rural India who thought that village societies and caste constraints would block the formation of labor markets. But locally, labor markets in South India were fed by a large landless population as well as by the roughly 15% of the population listed as Scheduled Castes, many of whom had been bonded laborers confined to villages. The privatization of land, growth of urban centers, and commercialization of farming generated increased the population looking for work to survive, and as Figure 1 shows, Madras Presidency sent the largest proportion of indentured labors to plantations overseas of all British provinces.

Locally, however, tiny parcels of land enabled many families to maintain their footing as peasants, putting a break on proletarianization; yet poor peasant labor was commodified by other means, through its need for subsistence income beyond what was available on family farms. Two mechanisms have been documented in most detail. Commercial crops provided survival income for peasants who effectively became workers for well-off local landed families who combined control of local credit, labor, and capital markets. Irrigation investments also enabled better endowed farmers to draw seasonally on poor peasant family labor at times of peak demand. Figure 2 indicates the predictable seasonality of this demand in the Rayalseema region. Poor farmers growing millet on small plots of dry land shift their work at regular intervals into wage-earning activities on nearby rice fields. Capitalist farmers' wage bill is kept down by nearby peasant subsistence cultivation.

9.5.3 Social mobility and differentiation.

Female workforce participation is relatively high in South India, along with female literacy. Rates of urbanization are also relatively high, making most localities in the South commercially-oriented and not self-sufficient in food. All of this implies substantial physical and social mobility, which have triggered a variety of conflicts, some quiet and some vociferous.

In Nellore District, on the Andhra coast, just north of Madras, real rental rates for land rose by a factor of nine during seventy-seven years between 1850 and 1927, and then doubled again during the fifty-five years from 1927 to 1982. The proportion of rent to output increased, especially after 1940, and the ratio of wet to dry land rent also increased, meaning owners of irrigated land became relatively better off. Rental income fuelled social mobility and urban investments. For rent receivers, occupational change "was mostly a one-way process" leading "from cultivation and traditional services to business, professions, and [other urban] employment." The residential trajectory led "from the native village to a small town, [to] the district headquarters and then to cities." Meanwhile, local land owners increased their numbers mostly in the category of marginal farmers with less than two hectares, and the number of written rental agreements declined because conflicting parties sought to avoid the courts.

Extended networks of mobility leading out of villages fuelled urban-based political movements such as the non-Brahman movement in Tamil Nadu, which increased opportunities for non-Brahman castes everywhere in the state. Brahmans left the land everywhere in the South, moving into circuits of employment that lead them overseas far out of proportion to their population. Meanwhile, in the villages of Tamil Nadu, in 1950 and in 1975, "assets of the top 1.0 percent of the [rural] households exceeded those of the lower 90.0 percent put together."

9.5.4. Regional Disparities

Only in Kerala have countervailing forces emerged to mitigate the market's social and spatial favoritism. In this respect, Kerala is unique not only in South India but among regions with comparable per capita income in the world. The downside is Kerala's disarticulation from global and national zones of capital investment and thus very low growth rates and related development indicators.

Elsewhere in the south, regional inequalities attending market-led development have been on the whole accentuated by the political power of dominant agrarian castes. Public and private investments have clustered along railway lines, river basins, and urban centers, where articulations with national and global economies have been most propitious. Disarticulations have produced "backward regions" from which labor and commodity crops flow but in which poverty rates far exceed nearby regions. This pattern is typical in India, where a recent study has shown poverty levels vary more inside states than across states. An illustrative 1984 study of Karnataka produced the following distribution of taluks according to measures of development.

9.5.5. Local Conflicts, Invisible Regions

Economic data on regional disparities do not reveal other regional outcomes of unven development. I want to end with a story of one hidden region in southernmost Tamil Nadu.

In 1975, a colleague of mine put his hand on my shoulder and turned me around to face north as we stood on the main street of Tirukkurungudi, a large, prosperous village nestled at the foot of the ghats in southwest Tirunelveli District, near Kanya Kumari. "Look," he said proudly, "from hear north to Madurai, it is all Marava country!"

This "country" (nadu) appears on no map. It is a discontinuous territory that runs north from Tirukkurungudi across a dry landscape dotted with irrigation tanks spanning about twenty miles across the edge of mountains and the plains below; and from Madurai it curves east down to Rameswaram. It is the territory in which Maravars or Tevars have exercised dominance for roughly 400 years. It is marked by the old fort towns founded by Marava palayakkarar under the royal Nayaks of Madurai. Its records include stories of battles against the British that becme nationalist lore. Its history also includes a very particular legacy of caste conflict, which hinges on contested control of local territories pitting Tevars against various competitors. This Marava territory was historically defined by its separation from areas of Telugu Nayak power in the east and Vellala/Brahman power in the south along the Tambraparni River.

In the 1890s, caste riots broke out regularly in the booming market towns in this territory as Maravas tried to stop the rising status of Nadars merchants who were fighting in the courts and on the streets for rights of temple entry. Keeping people out of temples, defending sacred temple precincts from pollution, expressed a wider power over space. Land ownership, access to forests, privileged house sites, places of honor in processions, a place at the table of the Raja or in the court of the British Collector - all of these constituted power by control over symbolic space. Territory obsessed Maravas, who fought one another for what British observers took to be totally worthless bits of scrubland.

In the twentieth century, generations of locally prominent Marava families, lead by the Raja of Ramanathapuram, have struggled to keep and expand their local power. They became active in the Dravidian Movement, ultimately forming a solid vote block that swung to MG Ramachandran in the 1980s and stayed behind Jayalalitha until the 1999 elections.

In the 1990s, Maravas have engaged in caste riots, often pogroms, against formerly untouchable Dalit landless laborers who have earned increasing incomes by working in the Gulf and by sending sons and daughters to school in towns rather than in villages. Dalits are installing statues of B.RAmbedkar, the symbol of Untouchable militancy in India; as Tevars fight to glorify their hero, Muthu Ramalinga Tevar, former Raja of Ramanathapuram, by erecting his statue at prominent cross-roads. Struggles focus on control of public space and access to public resources; and often riots begin with fights among children in school, on the school bus, or on the road on the way to and from school. Maravas are still fighting for Marava country, inch by inch, day by day, facing opposition all the way.

This struggle that seem to be merely local. But in the context of the long history of globalization in South India, it is part of local, regional, national, and global history, all at once..