Labors of Division
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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 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, paradoxically, as a result of a dramatic series of conceptual, juridical, and monetary divisions.
Far from archaic relics, this book ultimately reveals both the landowning peasant and landless laborer to be novel political subjects forged through the encounter between colonialism and struggles over culture and capital within Panjabi society. Questions of progress, exploitation and knowledge come to animate the vernacular operations of power. With this history, Gill brings difference and contingency to understandings of the global past in order to re-think the itinerary of comparative political economy as well as alternative possibilities for emancipatory futures.
—Andrew Sartori, New York University
"Labors of Division is an outstanding investigation of colonial market governance seen through the pivotal Punjabi peasant, elaborating postcolonial readings of political economy, the historiography of capitalism, and vernacular modernities. Gill compellingly illuminates the transformation of agrarian life-worlds through the workings and inhabitings of economic logics, from processes of caste standardization and hierarchization to the problem of indebtedness."
—Ritu Birla, University of Toronto
"A luminous contribution to the itineraries of global capitalism! Gill upends agrarian political economy by dislodging the sedimented figure of the "peasant", revealing with rigor and verve how colonial categories of rule petrified amorphous social relations to land in British India, producing a caste-based division of labor and laborers with lasting and pernicious consequences for Panjab's subaltern classes."
—Vinay Gidwani, University of Minnesota
"shed[s] important light on how imperialist forces leverage local state apparatuses and class power to advance their agenda of integration, exploitation, and accumulation and how Punjab's peasantry has resisted these forces for centuries."
—Paramjit Singh, Critical Sociology
"Readers wishing to expand or revise their understanding of the divisions of agrarian labor in colonial Panjab and/or of Euromerican theoreticians analyzing class and capitalism will find rich insights in Gill's exposition. Highly recommended."
—M. H. Fisher, CHOICE
