Agrarian production processes, and rural inequality in nineteenth-century Malabar

Abstract

This article is an attempt to understand the interactive and reciprocal processes through which structures of inequality in agrarian society were reproduced and transformed in concrete historical contexts and how these in turn impacted upon history to produce varying trajectories of change between different agro-economic zones or regions. The area taken up for study here is the erstwhile British Malabar (northern Kerala), from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth century. It attempts to relate the requirements of varied agrarian production regimes to the prevailing state system, tenurial systems and inequalities in land holding as well as social disparities represented by forms of caste differentiation.