Assembling the Local: Political Economy and Agrarian Governance in British India

Description: Assembling the Local by Upal Chakrabarti In Assembling the Local, Upal Chakrabarti argues that the local should be reconceptualized as an abstract machine, which was itself central to the construction of the universal, namely, the establishment of political economy as a form of governance in nineteenth-century British India. FORMAT Hardcover LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description In 1817, in a region of the eastern coast of British India then known as Cuttack, a group of Paiks, the areas landed militia, began agitating against the East India Companys government, burning down government buildings and looting the treasury. While the attacks were initially understood as an attempt to return the territorys native ruler to power, investigations following the rebellions suppression traced the cause back to the introduction of a model of revenue governance unsuited to local conditions. Elsewhere in British India, throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, interregional debates over revenue settlement models and property disputes in villages revealed an array of practices of governance that negotiated with the problem of their applicability to local conditions. And at the same time in Britain, the dominant Ricardian conception of political economy was being challenged by thinkers like Richard Jones and William Whewell, who sought to make political economy an inductive science, capable of analyzing the real world.Through analyses of these three interrelated moments in British imperial history, Upal Chakrabartis Assembling the Local engages with articulations of the "local" on multiple theoretical and empirical fronts, weaving them into a complex reflection on the problem of difference and a critical commentary on connections between political economy, agrarian property, and governance. Chakrabarti argues that the "local" should be reconceptualized as an abstract machine, central to the construction of the universal, namely, the establishment of political economy as a form of governance in nineteenth-century British India. Author Biography Upal Chakrabarti is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Presidency University, Kolkata. Table of Contents Introduction. Universality as DifferenceChapter 1. Science, Method, and Indigeneity: Political EconomyChapter 2. The Trace of the Local: RentChapter 3. Temporal Geographies of Power: PropertyChapter 4. Grounding Governance: VillageChapter 5. Disputes in the Locality: PeasantsConclusion. Rewriting ProductionNotesBibliographyIndexAcknowledgments Review In Assembling the Local, Upal Chakrabarti brings a creative and rigorous Foucauldian eye to the key role of the discourse of political economy in practices of colonial governance. Demonstrating the intimacy between universalism and the limit-case of locality that demarcates its reach, his work is a challenging contribution to the intellectual history of political economy. * Andrew Sartori, New York University *Assembling the Local offers a provocative new theoretical framework to understand the intellectual history of the British empire in India, especially in relation to the development of the science of political economy. Scholars have debated the extent to which metropolitan ideas shaped or were shaped by local patterns of rule and social relations. Upal Chakrabarti thoroughly upends the dichotomy of the local versus the universal as he skillfully tracks the meaning and function of the idea of the local both on the ground in early nineteenth-century Cuttack as well as in the inductive turn in the philosophy of science and political economy. * Karuna Mantena, Columbia University * Promotional In Assembling the Local, Upal Chakrabarti argues that the "local" should be reconceptualized as an abstract machine, which was itself central to the construction of the universal, namely, the establishment of political economy as a form of governance in nineteenth-century British India. Long Description In 1817, in a region of the eastern coast of British India then known as Cuttack, a group of Paiks, the areas landed militia, began agitating against the East India Companys government, burning down government buildings and looting the treasury. While the attacks were initially understood as an attempt to return the territorys native ruler to power, investigations following the rebellions suppression traced the cause back to the introduction of a model of revenue governance unsuited to local conditions. Elsewhere in British India, throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, interregional debates over revenue settlement models and property disputes in villages revealed an array of practices of governance that negotiated with the problem of their applicability to local conditions. And at the same time in Britain, the dominant Ricardian conception of political economy was being challenged by thinkers like Richard Jones and William Whewell, who sought to make political economy an inductive science, capable of analyzing the real world. Through analyses of these three interrelated moments in British imperial history, Upal Chakrabartis Assembling the Local engages with articulations of the "local" on multiple theoretical and empirical fronts, weaving them into a complex reflection on the problem of difference and a critical commentary on connections between political economy, agrarian property, and governance. Chakrabarti argues that the "local" should be reconceptualized as an abstract machine, central to the construction of the universal, namely, the establishment of political economy as a form of governance in nineteenth-century British India. Review Quote "In Assembling the Local , Upal Chakrabarti brings a creative and rigorous Foucauldian eye to the key role of the discourse of political economy in practices of colonial governance. Demonstrating the intimacy between universalism and the limit-case of locality that demarcates its reach, his work is a challenging contribution to the intellectual history of political economy."--Andrew Sartori, New York University Promotional "Headline" In Assembling the Local , Upal Chakrabarti argues that the "local" should be reconceptualized as an abstract machine, which was itself central to the construction of the universal, namely, the establishment of political economy as a form of governance in nineteenth-century British India. Excerpt from Book Introduction Universality as Difference Model, Limit, and Difference This book explores the problem of models and their limits over three interrelated sites in the first half of the nineteenth century: questions of landed property in a small area on the eastern coast of British India called Cuttack, debates over the method and categories of political economy in Britain, and practices of agrarian governance across different regions of British India. The category of the "local" featured recurrently in these three sites, signifying the limit of models. The local has been also similarly fashioned across a range of histories as an analytical tool to mark the limit, of models and frames. Interrogating the analytical constructions of this category in both the archives of the nineteenth century and more recent historiographic practice, I contend that it is more productive to read this limit as the model itself, rather than its outside. In considering the model-limit problem, the book proposes a relation between political economy and liberal governance in the imperial world of the nineteenth century, different from the prevalent understandings of this relation in the histories of empire, liberalism, and agrarian South Asia. The use of the category of the local in the nineteenth-century sites examined here enables and directs us to trace the complexities of this relation--between political economy and governance--in the light of the model-limit problem. In each of these sites the local expressed a limit of, or difference from, a model. In the interregional debates over principles of agrarian governance in British India, models of revenue settlement were constantly scrutinized and revised as they failed to address local specificities. In Cuttack, long-ranging contests took place between different kinds of land controllers over the local peculiarities of proprietary rights in the area. In Britain the public sphere witnessed raging contentions on the method and categories of political economy, where the dominant model of Ricardian political economy was questioned for being inapplicable to the different local conditions of the world. Generally, therefore, the local connoted difference from the universalizing claims of models. Specifically, it expressed differences in relations between forms of property and modes of sovereignty. In Cuttack, the local was mobilized by various kinds of native land controllers and colonial officials to highlight the differences in the proprietary forms of that place from other adjoining territories. At the same time, the category was repeatedly used across various levels of the imperial bureaucracy to argue that different regions in British India exhibited great differences in land tenures. In Britain over the same period, the debates that I refer to suggested that differences in property forms all over the world question the universal applicability of the method and categories of the prevalent and dominant framing of political economy. Differences in forms of property, in all these sites, were explained as effects of varying modes of sovereignty or political power existing in different places. The book engages with both general and specific articulations of the local, weaving out of them, simultaneously, reflections on the problem of difference and a critical commentary on connections between political economy, agrarian property, and governance. It is evident that over the three sites examined in the book, through the expression of the local, the problem of political economy and governance became the same, namely, that of understanding and managing difference, in this case, of property-sovereignty relations. I make sense of this problem by setting up a conversation between the early and late works of Michel Foucault, namely, between his reading of political economy as a discursive formation of the modern episteme and his lectures on liberal governance. I suggest that the workings of the local can provide a critical analytical mediation in understanding how, as Foucault argues, the principle of self-limitation of power emerged as the concurrent rationality of political economy and governance over the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This principle, as I demonstrate in greater detail later in this chapter, can be seen to manifest itself in the local, where difference was construed as constitutive of, and immanent to, universality. By making the local foundational to the universality of the discourse of political economy as governance, this book attempts to release the category of its predominant analytical use--in a range of historical works on empire, liberalism, and agrarian South Asia--as something outside the universal. In most of these works the local is presented as a form of social reality, which by being located at a geographical distance from the center, seems to be necessarily capable of producing a space different from the universal. Its geographically bounded condition is taken to imply its natural mark of difference from the boundless expanse of the universal. The book attempts to reconceptualize the local, refusing to perceive it as equivalent to a locality, or a geographical particular, typically understood as signifying radical alterity by both the historical context and the historiography I examine here. The archival sites I bring together demonstrate that the local, as a problem of difference, was absolutely central to the structuring of the universal, or the making of political economy as governance in nineteenth-century British India. Although the local was posited in these sites as something outside the universal, I argue that instead of merely existing as such an outside, it functioned as the key category in the making of the universal itself. Therefore, the inside-outside opposition was an effect of the way the local was presented in this discourse. I probe this presentation in the book, to understand how difference constituted universality. At the same time, I argue that a range of historical works uncritically adopted this construction of the local as an outside, using it pervasively to explain connections between imperialism, liberal abstractions, and the shaping of agrarian societies in British India. To displace the geographical foundationalism in these historiographic uses of the local, I do not argue that the local is already and always implicated in other more expansive spaces, like the regional, the national, the metropolitan, the imperial, and the global. Such an argument cannot fundamentally unyoke analysis from its geographical foundation. Contrarily, I argue, the local can be rethought as an abstract machine, producing spatial formations, which involve, but are not constitutive of, fixed geographical locales. This machine is assembled by releasing the local from its functioning in terms of the hardened binary of inside-outside, across the archival and historiographic sites mentioned earlier. I understand the machine as an immanent capacity to open up, which can also become a conceptual model for all those "rigidified territorialities that open the way for other transformational operations." What this book presents through this opening is not only a movement of perpetual displacement but also a capacity to effect transformations of meanings in practices. It is with this philosophical imperative that I construct the local, from within its multifarious deployments in a range of practices. Examined in different chapters, these practices are epistemological debates over scientific methodology and categories of political economy in nineteenth-century Britain, contentions between officials at various levels of the imperial bureaucracy over principles of agrarian governance, practices of agrarian governance in several localities of British India, along with Cuttack, and a variety of strategies by landholders of different kinds in Cuttack negotiating the rationalities of rule. The local was mobilized variously, by these practices, as difference constitutive of universality. In each of these sets of practices, therefore, it operated simultaneously as a critique and a model of universality. In the process, it became a transformative potential, opening up old universals, only to propose new closures. The practices examined in this book do not make a space where connections are simply established geographically, either as authoritarian flows from the metropole or as rebellious counter flows from the colony. This is also not a space in between, that of the empire. The book does not have the intention to argue, as Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler do, that "Europe was made by its imperial projects, as much as colonial encounters were shaped by conflicts within Europe itself." Histories inspired by this methodological move, despite establishing the dynamic space of imperial circuits as the object of analysis going beyond the metropole-colony division, remain analytically tied to geographical foundations. As a result, the imperial often falls back upon different kinds of movements between the clearly segregated geographical spaces of the metropole and the colony. It displays none of the dynamism that might be expected of what Cooper and Stoler identify as an "imperial" space, generated by contestations at various levels of a network of practices in the unified analytical field of the metropole-colony. Most important, these histories do not unchain space from physical geographies. Moving away from such physical-geographical spatial organizations, this book makes sense of the local differently. I show how the spatial meaning of this category--generated from within the practices studied--served as an engagement with the problem of universality, and as its critique. From this point, I build the local up as a conceptual space, which had the capacity to transform old meanings a Details ISBN081225273X Author Upal Chakrabarti Short Title Assembling the Local Pages 288 Language English ISBN-10 081225273X ISBN-13 9780812252736 Format Hardcover Subtitle Political Economy and Agrarian Governance in British India Year 2021 Publication Date 2021-01-22 UK Release Date 2021-01-22 Imprint University of Pennsylvania Press Place of Publication Pennsylvania Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2021-01-22 NZ Release Date 2021-01-22 US Release Date 2021-01-22 Publisher University of Pennsylvania Press Series Intellectual History of the Modern Age Alternative 9780812297713 DEWEY 338.1/85409034 Audience Tertiary & Higher Education We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! 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