Chapter 35 Part Two Results Chapter Eight Land 4

4 For much of Europe, the legal revolution, as we have seen, seemed to have been imposed from without, from above, that is, an artificial earthquake rather than a long-term loosening slip.This is even more pronounced when the legal revolution is imposed on non-capital economy regions (such as Africa and Asia) that are completely subject to the capitalist economy. In Algeria, the conquering French faced a society with medieval characteristics, a well-established and fairly prosperous religious school system, financed by many pious foundations. (These religious lands are equivalent to the land donated to the church by Christian countries for charitable or ceremonial purposes in the Middle Ages.) It is said that the literacy rate of French peasant soldiers is not as good as that of the people they conquered.As a result, schools were closed as institutions of superstition; religious land was allowed to be purchased by Europeans who knew neither its usefulness nor its legal inalienability; and school teachers—often members of influential religious fraternities — then emigrated to the unconquered regions, thereby strengthening the insurrection under Abd-el-Kader.Land began to be institutionalized as purely private property that could be bought and sold, although the full consequences were not manifested until later.In a region like Kabylia, a complex web of private and collective rights and obligations prevents the chaos of land disintegration into fragments just big enough for an individual to grow a fig tree plot.But how can European liberals make sense of this complex web?

Algeria had not been conquered by 1848.Vast areas of India had by then been under direct British rule for more than a generation.Since none of the European inhabitants coveted Indian lands, the question of total expropriation did not arise.The influence of liberalism on rural life in India began with a series of explorations by the British rulers for convenient and effective land taxation laws.It is this combination of greed and legal individualism that has brought disaster to India.The complexity of land ownership in India prior to the British conquest, like everything in Indian society, was traditional but not static.In general, however, such land ownership rests on two solid pillars: that the land belongs (legally or de facto) to an autonomous group (tribe, clan, rural community, trade association, etc.), and that the government receives a portion of it product.Although some lands are negotiable in a certain sense, and some lands can be interpreted as tenant farming, and some rural contributions can also be understood as land rents, in fact, they have neither landlords, tenants and individual estates, nor British land. ground rent in a sense.It was a state of affairs so incomprehensible and terribly distasteful to the administrators and rulers of England that they set out to straighten out the countryside in familiar ways.Bengal was the first large area under the direct rule of the British. The local Mughal Empire relied on tax collectors or government-appointed tax collectors (Zaimindar, Zemindar) to collect land taxes.These people must be equivalent to the landowners in England, paying a fixed tax according to the total amount of their territories (like the land tax in contemporary England); The support of foreign regimes must also confer stability.In a memorandum dated 18 June 1789, the future Lord Teignmouth wrote: "It is my opinion that Chamindale, as proprietor of the land, should have the property of land which he has inherited by right of inheritance . . . The privilege of disposing of land by sale or mortgage derives from this fundamental right..." The various Chamindar systems were later applied to about 19 per cent of British India.

Greed, not convenience, determined the second system of taxation, the Ryotwari, which applied to half of British India.The local English rulers considered themselves heirs of Oriental despotism, which, according to a view not original to them, was the supreme lord of all land, while the peasants were regarded as small yeomen, or rather tenants, So they tried to take on the difficult task of taxing each farmer individually.The principle behind this system, to paraphrase the terse language of able bureaucrats, was agrarian liberalism in its purest form.The principle, in the words of Goldsmia and Wingate, is "to limit joint liability to the few cases where land is held jointly or redistributed by joint heirs; Recognize land property rights; land owners enjoy complete freedom of operation, including collecting land rent from sublessors and buying and selling land; through the sharing of land taxation, land can be bought and sold and transferred more effectively.”Communal organizations are bypassed entirely, despite strong opposition from the Madras tax office.They correctly realized that the village community was the best protector of private land, and it would be far more practical to settle taxes collectively with the village community than to levy taxes individually.As a result dogmatism and greed prevailed, while the "grace of private land" was reserved for Indian farmers.

The shortcomings of this system were so obvious that in the subsequent conquests or occupations of North India (including about 30 per cent of what was later British India), the solution to land problems reverted to a modified Chamindar system, except Attempts were made to recognize existing collective institutions, most notably in Punjab. The combination of liberal creed and merciless plunder brought new pressures on the downtrodden peasants: peasant taxes rose sharply (land taxes in Bombay increased by more than doubled).Through the influence of the utilitarian leader Mill, Malthus and Ricardo's tax doctrine became the basis of Indian tax policy.This doctrine regards the taxation from the land as a pure surplus which has nothing to do with value.It arises only because some lands are more fertile than others and are appropriated by landlords with increasingly harmful consequences for the entire economy.Therefore, the confiscation of all lands has no effect on the wealth of a country, with the sole exception that it may prevent the landed nobles from enriching themselves by extorting industrialists.In a country like Britain, the political power of land interests would have made such a radical solution (which amounted to de facto nationalization of the land) impossible; but in India, the despotic power of an ideological conqueror could enforce this point.On this issue, two lines of liberalism are colliding. Nineteenth-century Whig administrators and old-school business interests often took the commonsense view that ignorant small farmers on the edge of subsistence would never accumulate land capital to improve the economy.They were therefore in favor of Bengali-type "Permaent Settlements" (Permaent Settlements) as it favored the landowner class with a perpetually fixed (i.e. falling rate) tax rate, thereby encouraging them to save and improve their land.Utilitarian administrators, represented by the famous old Mill, preferred land nationalization and a large group of small tenant farmers to avoid the danger of a landed aristocracy re-emerging.If India was only a little bit like Britain, the Whig point of view was of course more overwhelmingly persuasive, and after the Indian Mutiny of 1857 it did become so for political reasons.In fact, both views are equally irrelevant to Indian agriculture.However, as the Industrial Revolution unfolded at home, the private interests of the old East India Company (i.e., to have a moderately prosperous colony to exploit) became increasingly subordinate to the general interests of British industry (i.e., to have India as a market, a a source of income, not a competitor).Thus, a utilitarian policy was prioritized as it ensured tight control and high tax returns for the UK.Before the British rule, the traditional tax limit was an average of one-third of the annual income; while the standard basis of British levies was as high as half of the annual income.Taxation was not reduced to a less exacting rate until after dogmatic utilitarian policies caused apparent poverty and the uprising of 1857.

The application of economic liberalism to Indian lands created neither a group of enlightened landowners nor a strong class of homesteaders.Just brought in another uncertainty, another complex web of rural parasites and exploiters (e.g. new officials under British rule), a massive transfer and concentration of land ownership, and a rise in peasant debt and poverty.When the East India Company first took over the Cawnpore area (Uttar Pradesh), more than 84% of the land in the area was owned by hereditary landowners.By 1840, about 40% of the land was purchased by its owners, and it rose to 62.6% in 1872.In addition, in 1846-1847, in the three districts of the northwestern provinces (Uttar Pradesh), more than 3,000 plots or villages (roughly three-fifths of the total) changed hands from their original owners, of which more than 750 were transferred to in the hands of moneylenders.

The enlightened and institutionalized absolutism of the utilitarian bureaucrats who established British rule during this period is worth mentioning.This despotism brought peace, multiple public services, and administrative efficiency.Sound laws, and a cleaner government.But economically, they clearly failed.India was constantly tormented by famines that claimed countless lives, on a scale that far outstripped all areas under European governments, European-type governments, or even Imperial Russia.Perhaps (although statistics from earlier periods are lacking), famines grew worse as the century drew to a close.

Apart from India, there is only one other large colony (or former colony) that has ever attempted to impose liberal land laws.This is Latin America.There, as long as the white colonists could get the land they wanted, the old-style Spanish feudal colonization never showed any prejudice against the Indian land property system, even though most of them belonged to the tribal collectives.Independent governments, however, worked towards liberalization in the spirit of the French Revolution and Benthamism that inspired them.In Peru, for example, Bolivar decreed the distribution of communal land to individual ownership (1824); and most emerging republics, in the manner of the Spanish liberals, abolished limited inheritance rights.The liberalization of aristocratic lands may have resulted in some reorganization and decentralization of land, although vast estates (estancia, finca, fundo) remained the dominant form of land in most republics.Attacks on tribal land property have met with minimal success.In fact, the question did not really become urgent until after 1850.The liberalization of its political economy remains, in fact, as artificial as the liberalization of its political system.Despite parliaments, elections, land laws, etc., Latin America largely continued to exist in much the same way as before.