Paper short abstract:

This paper will argue that the process of forming British colonial governance and ruler–subject relations in Eastern Bengal was contextual, negotiated, and diverse. It introduces the concept “fiscal subject”.

Paper long abstract:

The process of forming British colonial governance and ruler-subject relations in Eastern Bengal was contextual, negotiated, and diverse.

The Mughal diwani of Bengal (1765) granted the British East India Company access to revenue resources over territories larger than the British Isles. However, collecting revenues depended on participation in complex socio-economic webs, resting on norms of personal relations between sovereign and subject. These were the Achilles' heel of the EIC. It not only lacked attachments to subjects, it also lacked the status and identities that would have made such attachments possible. We may usefully see the Company's revenue surveys as a search for subjects capable of claiming and justifying specific rights under EIC governance. These could only be established by meeting people and assessing the validity of their claims.

The fiscal relations of landed property were by far the most extensive and institutionalized of the Company's relations to subjects. As such, it gave subjects only limited rights in the emerging polity. We may think of them as "fiscal subjects".

But the EIC was an early-modern corporation of merchants; not a state. Driven by commercial interests and accountable to shareholders, the extensive revenue surveys in the 1790s became a bureaucratic quick-fix which the Company came to regret. The consequences proved disastrous. Universal land classifications clashed with environmental realities in a monsoon climate and, until the 1830s, the Company was forced to acknowledge Mughal privileges in land since they could not stand up against the socio-economic tenacity of the former polity.