Commodity crop and clash over commons: jute and spatial politics in early-twentieth-century Assam

How did colonial British efforts to expand the frontier of agrarian capitalism transform the environment and come to shape questions of land and belonging in South Asia? My paper investigates this dynamic by focusing on how the commodity crop of jute — British India’s single biggest export earner from the early 1900s — created an expansive field of politics by changing the agrarian landscape in the province of Assam over the first half of the twentieth century. Jute came to Assam from neighboring Bengal at the beginning of the twentieth century. By the late-nineteenth century, the city of Calcutta in colonial Bengal had emerged as jute’s global manufacturing hub, surpassing Scotland’s Dundee. As suitable lands for cultivating this riverine crop became exhausted in the Bengal Delta, the floodplains of the Brahmaputra Valley in adjacent Assam became the new frontier for jute and the large jute-growing peasantry by the turn of the century. However, the transregional expansion of the jute frontier evoked both hope and despair. While hundreds of thousands of jute cultivators from East Bengal settled in Assam dreaming of a debt-free future, the region’s long-resident locals started contesting the new enterprise as a disruptive force to the traditional resource-use patterns and property regime of the Brahmaputra Valley. This contest eventually became the source of enduring economic, social, cultural, and political conflicts in the region.