ABSTRACT
This chapter wishes to indicate (and possibly correct) an imbalance in economic history which has tended to locate the genesis of capitalist relations in the urban sector. It suggests instead that the economic responses in the agrarian sector were equally significant. These can be encapsulated by a generic term – agrarian capitalism. The second objective of this chapter is to think of an economic framework to locate and understand the dynamics of these changes. An Asian model of capitalism, based on an endogenous urbanization and an intensively commercialized rice-producing economy, is already documented in the case of Tokugawa Japan. Can a case be made for a similar economic constellation for South Asia in the three centuries preceding the disjuncture of the nineteenth century? This chapter argues that agrarian capitalism can function as fully developed capitalism by enabling expanded reproduction of capital and by creating complex systems of private ownership, extensive commodity production and circulation and intricate divisions between capital and labor in the agro-commercial economy as well as in the export-oriented economies of the maritime cities. This may perhaps necessitate a reconsideration of modernity as an exclusively European capitalist privilege.
