A Political Economy of Comparison: Global Capitalism and the Emergence of the Peasant in Colonial Panjab

One of the most durable figures in modern history, the peasant has long been a site of intense intellectual and political debate. Yet underlying much of this literature is the assumption that the peasantry simply existed everywhere, a general if not generic group, traced backward from the present to antiquity. Within the British empire, Panjab has been regarded as the quintessential agrarian province inhabited by a diligent, prosperous and “martial race” of cultivators. Against such essentialist depictions, I explore the landowning peasant and landless laborer as novel political subjects forged in the encounter between colonialism and struggles over culture and capital within Panjabi society. British officials and ascendant Panjabis together disrupted existing forms of identity and activity to generate a new kind of rural hierarchy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through an interrogation of a disparate archive – settlement reports and legal judgments to labor contracts, vernacular poetry, and family budgets – I challenge the givenness of the peasant by explicating the ideological and material divisions that transformed the equation of power in the countryside, and thus reconfigured global capitalism. Weaving together economic logic with cultural difference, this presentation offers a way to re-think the itinerary of comparative political economy alongside alternative possibilities for emancipatory futures.