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Excerpt from Memorandum of the Improvements in the Administration of India During the Last Thirty Years: And the Petition of the East-India Company to Parliament Where any ancient proprietors, either middle men or village communities, were found in existence, and in possession of their proprietary rights, at the time of the survey, those rights have been respected but in general, the principle of the reformed Bombay system is ryotwar. The land, cultivated 'and waste together, is divided into portions called fields, the extent of a field being for the most part fixed at the quantity of land which can be cultivated with one yoke of bullocks. On each field the Government demand is fixed, for a period of thirty years, at a very moderate rate. While the contract is binding on the Government, the ryot, On his side, can throw up the land at pleasure; and he is not required to pay the assessment for any year, on any field which he has not cultivated, or undertaken to cultivate, in that year. The appended note explains the details of the process. The fixation of the Government demand for thirty years would have been of little service to the ryot, if the demand had remained so high as to require, almost every year, remissions of uncertain amount. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

This book examines the ruptured characteristics of colonialism in nineteenth-century India. It connects the British East India Company’s efforts at the bourgeoisation of India with the Revolt of 1857. The volume shows how the mutiny of Indian sepoys in the British Indian army became a popular uprising of peasants, artisans and discontented aristocrats against the British. Tracing the rationale and consequences of this conflict, the monograph highlights how newly introduced political, economic and agrarian policies as part of industrial Britain’s colonial policy wreaked havoc, resulting in high land revenue assessment and its harsh mode of collection, rural indebtedness, steady immiseration of peasants, widespread land alienation, destitution and suicide. Using rare archival sources, this book will be an important intervention in the study of nineteenth-century India, and will deeply interest scholars and researchers of modern Indian history and politics.