ABSTRACT
It is evident that not only the perceptions of the tenancy debates but also the impulses for reform were essentially ideological. Both provided for law to triumph over custom, intervention over 'natural' progress, standardisation over variety. At the core of the triumph were the diagnosis and the remedy proposed—that is, property. Indigo abuses helped focus the willingness to legislate, as did famine and Bihari poverty, and (paradoxically) a host of other dissatisfactions with the nature and impact of British law and administration. But, as ever, as in Trevelyan quoted in the last chapter, property was the programme— whether to promote economic improvement, or to protect the subjects against an overweening state and from one another. The Tenancy Act was also, therefore, a marker of particular decisions about the nature and advantages of unequal possession, for classes and individuals.
