Reflections

Abstract

This book has shown how the patterns of agrarian dynamism and stagnation in colonial Bengal can only be understood by placing them in a long-term ecological perspective. Until recently, much of the historical scholarship on modern Bengal has dealt with a shorter time-frame, focusing either on the ‘transition period’ to colonialism or on the late colonial period leading up to decolonization. In pursuing a long-term historical perspective, this book has argued that the region’s ecology made East Bengal a prosperous and dynamic part of South Asia’s economy until far later than most historians imagine. This was a frontier region, drawing in capital, labour and intense imperial interest until at least the 1890s. Rural poverty in the area that is now Bangladesh emerged only in the twentieth century. As this book has argued, such downward shifts in agrarian economy and well-being stemmed from changes developing from the complex relationship between state, society and the region’s highly fluid ecological regime.