Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

All the greatest rivers of monsoon Asia – the Indus, Ganga, Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Salween, Chao Phraya, Mekong, Yangtze, and Huang Ho – come to life atop the world, in Tibet's high mountains, cold, rocky, and dry, where scruffy nomads herd goats. The rivers descend through deep twisting valleys, gorging themselves on melting snow and monsoon rain from countless tributaries, and they finally settle down to wandering the lush green lowlands of ancient agrarian civilizations, joining the sea in the teeming hot deltaic heartlands of Asia's modern world economy. On the way down from the highlands, rivers change names and identities to mark their passage through the homelands of history, where nature's free-running waters acquire social life in geographies inscribed most powerfully by the great imperial civilizations that came to life in river lowlands, expanding their reach over centuries, upstream and downstream, across the plains, into the highlands. Many smaller, less powerful homelands also evolved in the pathways of imperial expansion, and interactions among all these societies, in their different habitats, produced a vast diversity of connected communities, which collectively entered the historical record ‘during the first millennium CE, [when] nascent centers of … civilization were part of an interacting continuum of communities that occupied, thickly or thinly, the whole of South Asia’. As Sumit Guha goes on to explain,

Over the past two millennia, imperial state territorialism, spreading out from the lowlands, has defined Asia's historical geography. Forest, jungle, mountain, desert, river, ocean, and savannah became peripheral, exotic habitats for people outside core regions of imperial culture filled with intensive farming, commerce, arts, manufacturing, urbanity, and spatial order, where progress meant imposing their imperial design on their surrounding environment.

Because there are too many relevant titles, I limit citations to monographs and anthologies, as much as possible, and cite later work that supersedes earlier scholarship. I omit some citations which have appeared previously in the footnotes. The lists of titles are alphabetical by authors, and each author’s titles are listed chronologically. A fuller bibliography, which I will update and expand, appears on my homepage: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~dludden/.

Intellectual history

Agriculture became an official topic for scholarly analysis under Company Raj. The most useful monographs on agrarian ideas in the Company period are S. Ambirajan, Classical Political Economy and British Policy in India (Cambridge, 1968), Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal (Paris, 1963), Burton Stein, Thomas Munro: The Origins of the Colonial State and His Vision of Empire (Delhi, 1989), and Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (Oxford, 1959). For the later Raj, see B. R. Tomlinson, The Political Economy of the Raj, 1914±1947: The Economics of Decolonization (New York, 1979) and Bipan Chandra, The Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India: Economic Policies of the Indian National Leadership, 1880-1905 (New Delhi, 1966), which is supplemented by Bipan Chandra’s editing of M. G. Ranade, Ranade’s Economic Writings (New Delhi, 1990). For post-1950s of®cial thought, see A. M. Zaidi and S. G. Zaidi, The Foundations of Indian Economic Planning (New Delhi, 1979) and A. Moin Zaidi, ed., A Tryst with Destiny: A Study of Economic Policy Resolutions of the INC Passed During the Last 100 Years (New Delhi, 1985).

In the nineteenth century, industrial empire brought new force into the transformation of agrarian regions. Britain controlled the corridors of mobility in southern Eurasia. English became the imperial language. A new rupee homogenised the money supply.

In 1800, cowry shells from the Andamans were the currency in Sylhet, and dozens of different silver, gold, and copper coins filled markets from Surat to Chittagong. Money changers worked every corner. But in the 1820s, the Company’s silver rupee set the monetary standard and market prices began a tumble that lasted thirty years. In these hard decades, markets contracted along routes of imperial expansion, real taxation increased, seasons of scarcity were common, and overseas cloth exports died. The Act of 1793 had established a permanent settlement with no survey, no records of rights, and no definite method of assessment; after 1820, zamindari settlements required the recording of rights, annual assessments of cultivated land, and periodic reassessments. Almost everywhere, routine revenue collections provoked struggles and dislocations. When indigo stocks crashed on the London exchange, Bihari peasants lost their income and tenants lost their land. The Torture Commission in Madras reported routine beatings by revenue officers. Company critics multiplied in London but could not quite topple the old regime before rebellions killed the Company in 1857. Crown rule ended an imperial crisis. Prices had begun moving upward again by 1855, and decades of inflation then steadily lowered the real cash burden of revenue and rent. Land became more attractive for investors as a veneer of modernity covered British India.

The long history of agriculture is of countless ecological interventions that have given nature its civility, and imparted personality to the land, as people have cut down forests, diverted rivers, built lakes, killed predators, tamed, bred, and slaughtered animals, and burnt, dug, and axed natural growth to replace it with things that people desire. Farming occurs in a land of emotion, and agrarian territories need gods, poetry, ritual, architecture, outsiders, frontiers, myths, border-lands, landmarks, and families, which give farms meaning and purpose. Together, brute power and refined aesthetics culture the land, and war is so prominent in old poetry because making a homeland is violent business. In the long span of agrarian history, therefore, a great variety of skills have combined to make nature a natural environment, and agrarian territories have emerged historically much like cuisine. Clearing the land and sculpting the fields create a place for the nurture and collection of ingredients. Skilled labour selects, cultivates, kills, dresses, chops, and grinds. Fuels, pots, knives, axes, hoes, mortar and pestle, and many other implements are involved in making all the daily meals and special feasts that sustain work, family, and community. Like a farmer’s home territory, a cuisine’s complexity and refinement always develop within networks of exchange and specialisation, because materials, ideas, techniques, and tastes come from many sources; but each cuisine also emerges inside spaces of cultured accumulation and experimentation, in which people experience their place in the world, territorially, as they make their very own set of special ingredients into appropriate foods for appropriate occasions.

Most of human history in South Asia is a feature of life on the land, but most documents that we use to write agrarian history concern the state. Kautilya’s Arthasastra set the tone by putting farming and herding under the heading of state revenue. Hundreds of thousands of stone and copper inscriptions appear in the first millennium of the Common Era (ce). Scattered across the land from Nepal to Sri Lanka, they documented agrarian conditions, but their purpose was rather to constitute medieval dynasties. After 1300, official documents narrate more and more powerful states. In the sixteenth century, Mughal sultans built South Asia’s first empire of agrarian taxation, and their revenue assessments, collections, and entitlements produced more data on agrarian conditions than any previous regime. In 1595, Abu-l Fazl’s Ai’n-i Akbari depicted agriculture in accounts of imperial finance. After 1760, English officials did the same. After 1870, nationalists rendered the country as part of the nation, and since 1947 agriculture has been a measure of national development. For two millennia, elites have recorded agrarian facts to bolster regimes and to mobilise the opposition, so we inherit a huge archive documenting agrarian aspects of historical states.

Over the centuries, however, agrarian history has also moved along in farming environments, outside the institutional structure of states, almost always connected in one way or another to state authority, but embedded basically in the everyday life of agricultural communities. Dynasties expand into agrarian space. Empires incorporate farm and forest, using various degrees and types of power, gaining here, losing there, adapting to local circumstances and modifying state institutions to embrace new regions of cultivation.

In the fourteenth century, South Asia became a region of travel and transport connecting Central Asia and the Indian Ocean. This redefined the location of all its agrarian territories. In the wake of the Mongols, overland corridors of routine communication extended from the Silk Road to Kanya Kumari and branched out to seaports along the way. Connections among distant parts of Eurasia became numerous and routine. New technology, ideas, habits, languages, people and needs came into farming communities. New elements entered local cuisine. People produced new powers of command, accumulation, and control, focused on strategic urban sites in agrarian space. By 1600, ships sailed between China, Gujarat, Europe, and America. Horses trotted across the land between Tajikistan and Egypt, Moscow and Madurai. Camels caravaned between Syria and Tibet, Ajmer, and Agra. A long expansion in world connections occurred during centuries when a visible increase in farming intensity was also reshaping agrarian South Asia. In the dry, interior uplands, warriors built late-medieval dynasties, on land formerly held by pastoralists and nomads; and sultans established a new political culture, whose hegemony would last to the nineteenth century. Slow but decisive change during late-medieval centuries laid the basis formore dramatic trends after 1500, when agricultural expansion accelerated along with the mobility and the local agrarian power of warriors and merchants. Regional formations of agrarian territory came into being, sewn together by urban networks, during a distinctively early modern period of agrarian history, whose patterns of social power, agricultural expansion, and cultural change embrace the empires of Akbar and the East India Company.

This book is about history’s attachment to land. It considers the present day in the context of the past two millennia, because a wide historical view is needed to appreciate the ideas that shape contemporary mentalities, and because earthly environments today are being shaped by long-term historical forces. As the book goes on, I consider some elements of Eurasian history and introduce some ideas about geography, technology, patriarchy, ritual, ecology, and other subjects that situate South Asian farmers in their wider world. I also indicate that more research into the historical dynamics of territoriality is needed to improve our knowledge of culture and political economy. But, like other volumes in The New Cambridge History of India, the main goal of this book is to draw together research by many scholars on a coherent set of historical themes without rehearsing academic debates or piling up citations. The bibliographical essay is a guide to relevant literature that sprawls across the disciplines of history, anthropology, economics, geography, political science, and rural sociology. I apologise for not covering many regions well enough and particularly for slighting Assam, Baluchistan, Chhattisgarh, Kerala, Nepal, Orissa, and Sri Lanka. This failure results partly from the state of research but mostly from my own inability to compile appropriate data in the time and space allotted. For these reasons, territories in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan form my central subject matter.