Labors of Division: Global Capitalism and the Emergence of the Peasant in Colonial Punjab

"The peasant has long been one of the most durable figures in modern history and the site of intense intellectual and political debate.

Yet underlying much of this literature is the assumption that peasants simply existed everywhere, a general if not generic group, traced backward from modernity to antiquity.

Focused on the transformation of Panjab during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this book accounts for the colonial origins of global capitalism through a radical history of the concept of "the peasant," demonstrating how seemingly fixed hierarchies were in fact produced, legitimized, and challenged within the preeminent agricultural region of South Asia.

Navyug Gill uncovers how and why British officials and ascendant Panjabis disrupted existing forms of identity and occupation to generate a new agrarian order in the countryside.

The notion of the hereditary caste peasant engaged in timeless cultivation thus emerged,