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Abstract
Banerjee and Iyer find that districts which the British assigned to landlord revenue systems systematically underperform districts with non-landlord based revenue systems in agricultural performance, after the onset of the Green Revolution in the mid-1960s. Based on colonial documents, archival research and the work of historians, we correct a mis-interpretation of the land revenue system in Central Provinces, which BI characterise as landlord based. The historical evidence suggests that this region should be attributed to a mixed landlord/non-landlord based revenue system. Using a more appropriate classification, we find no evidence that agricultural performance of Indian districts in the post-independence period was adversely affected by the landlord land revenue system.
Notes
An Online Appendix is available for this article which can be accessed via the online version of this journal available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00220388.2013.807502
1. The paper received the Inaugural Michael Wallerstein Award from the Political Economy Section of the American Political Science Association. There are currently more than 500 Google Scholar cites for the several versions of the paper. Web of Knowledge reports 93 non-self citations in 57 journals, many highly rated in economics, political science and other disciplines.
2. A relevant section is quoted in the Online Appendix p. 3 (extract from Baden-Powell, Citation1894). We return to Baden-Powell’s interpretation below.
3. Apart from its contributions to India’s economic history, the present article undertakes what Hamermesh (2007) would classify as a (partial) scientific replication of BI’s (2005) study. Pure replication or ‘checking’ (Collins, Citation1991) may be useful for detecting errors in data or in computer code. Scientific replication requires effort to develop contextual understanding, and attention to potential confounders and rival explanations.
4. BI use the term ‘landlord system’ as synonymous with the Permanent (zamindari) settlement apart from a footnote (fn.3 p.1193; see also fn. 10 p.1197; see also Robb, Citation1988, 1997).
5. On the nature of the Central Provinces (CP) settlement, BI, in footnote 9 (p. 1196), quote B. H. Baden-Powell (Citation1892): ‘In the Central Provinces we find an almost wholly artificial tenure, created by our revenue-system and by the policy of the Government of the day’ (vol. 2, p. 455). Later in the same paragraph, Baden-Powell writes: ‘It is however generally recognised that it was a mistake to find proprietors at all; not only have portions of the province been left purely raiyatwari, but in all cases the proprietary rights of the malguzar has been much limited’ (Baden-Powell, p. 456)’.
6. The World Bank data set could be downloaded at the date of writing from the source given in our Online Appendix. It contains some errors and misclassifications which are not corrected in the BI data set or the one used here to maintain maximum comparability with BI. The sources for much of the rest of the BI data set are given in their web appendix, Table 3.
7. The Bengal Rent Act of 1859, culminating in the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885, and subsequent revisions attempted to control landlord-tenant relations in Bengal, particularly some protection from eviction (see Robb, 1977, pp. 36–75, 1988).
8. Notice that the CP also included very large feudal or semi-feudal estates that often were remnants of former Gond and other Kingdoms and typically were located in forest and/or marginal lands in what Fuller (1922, p. 70) describes as the ‘wilder portions of the province’: for revenue purposes these areas, described as Zamindari estates in CP district revenue settlement reports, were treated separately. This illustrates the endogenous placement of land revenue systems in CP districts with low productivity and remoteness correlating with Zamindari status. Our Online Appendix Section A1 describes these estates in more detail and in a robustness test explained below we check whether our main results are sensitive to their presence.
9. Referring to Jabalpur, Narsinghpur and Hoshangabad districts.
10. See further Fuller, Citation1922, p. 47.
11. ‘The malik makbuza paid revenue to the government but no rent to the malguzar: The right of absolute occupancy was conferred at the time of the first settlement (1860s) to selected tenants and could not be acquired later. This right was hereditary, transferable and ensured fixity of rent for the term of the settlement. The occupancy tenant was entitled to cultivate his plot at a rent to be fixed by a revenue officer and not the landlord’ (Raghavan, Citation1985, p. 171).
12. This data set is a STATA data file named yld_sett_aug03.dta, which is available on the website of the American Economic Review, with the appropriate README file. Some errors in this data set have been retained to maintain as much consistency with BI as possible.
13. BI also present plots of 10 landlord and non-landlord districts in Tamil Nadu from the colonial period onwards. However, we are unable to replicate this figure, as the original data are not provided by BI in the online AER data repository, no specific references are given for them by BI, and we have not found them readily available from the archives.
14. We can nearly exactly replicate all BI results from the data provided by BI and our STATA code; these results are available from the authors.
15. Our do files are written using different code to BI, but benefiting from a reading of their do files. This is done as part of good replication practice to force checking of the way the code represents the model reported in the text.
16. BI classify the district as ‘landlord’ if it was under a landlord-based system and only partly converted to a different system or if it was in Oudh, which they argue had a higher proportion of landlords, due to a reversal of British colonial policy after 1856. See page 1202 and the web appendix, of their paper for further details
17. It should be noted that when we run the BI do file for col. (2) of with their data set, we obtain results for 107 districts, and not 109 districts as reported in their text.
18. We have explored in greater detail which type of land revenue system (mahalwarii, raiyatwari, zamindari and malguzari) mattered for agricultural development in post-independent India, and show that there is considerable heterogeneity in the impact of individual land revenue systems on agricultural performance, which is masked by the dichotomous landlord-non-landlord classification used by BI. See Table A5 in Online Appendix.
19. See Appendix Table A2 in BI, available on the website of the American Economic Review.
20. See also footnote 21 in BI, p. 1202.
21. BI argue that this dummy variable is a valid instrument as the areas that came under British land revenue control from 1823 onwards were predominantly non-landlord systems, under an explicit British policy from that year. In this year Thomas Munro became the Governor of Madras Presidency and actively argued for the establishment of a land revenue system which was imposed directly on individual cultivators (the raiyatwari system). According to BI, the proponents of the raiyatwari became dominant following the adoption of Holt MacKenzie’s famous minute (dated 1 July 1819, passed into law in 1822). This policy was reversed in 1856 when the British annexed the region of Oudh and brought back landlords as collectors of revenue, as they felt that having landlords on their side would be politically advantageous (BI, p. 1196). BI argue that the placement of non-landlord systems in districts that came under British rule from 1820 to 1856 was due to exogenous political developments and unrelated to any district-level characteristics. Therefore, according to BI, a dummy for the date of British conquest being between 1820 and 1856 is a valid instrument for the non-landlord revenue proportion measure.
22. The only difference between our IV strategy and that of BI is that we use as an instrument a dummy variable which takes the value of one if the date of British revenue control is between 1813 and 1856, while BI’s instrument takes the value one if a district came under British rule after 1820. However, historical records suggest that the raiyatwari system became the preferred system much before 1823, and closer to 1813. Indeed, the whole subject came to be looked at from a new point of view between 1807 and 1820, not only as a consequence of the inquiries made in the North-Western Provinces, but because of the general interest in the subject excited by the strong ‘Raiyatwari’ minutes of Sir Thomas Munro in Madras, and his visit home and conferences with the Directors in 1807’ (Baden-Powell, Citation1892, p. 17). Thus, we use the earlier date to construct our instrument. Substantively this changes the value of the instrument for the districts that were conquered between 1813 and 1818 and which are predominantly in Bombay Presidency, Berar and the subsequent CP (of the 30 districts affected by this reclassification, 14 are in present-day Madhya Pradesh, and 10 in Maharashtra).
23. In the Online Appendix (Figure A4 and Table A3), we provide further justification of our instrumental variable, as well as present the first-stage regression results for BI and our specifications.
24. Here the term ‘Zamindari’ has an altogether different meaning – see Online Appendix Section A1 for more details.
25. While outside the scope of this article, an issue that needs further exploration is why the non-landlord settlement areas in Punjab, Haryana and parts of Western Uttar Pradesh responded favorably to the introduction of Green Revolution technology in the 1960s, but the non-landlord settlement areas of the CP (now most of Madhya Pradesh) failed to do so.