TY - BOOK ID - 85473672 TI - Land and local kingship in 18th century Bengal PY - 1992 VL - 53 SN - 0511563345 0521410746 052152654X PB - Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, DB - UniCat KW - Land tenure KW - Agrarian tenure KW - Feudal tenure KW - Freehold KW - Land ownership KW - Land question KW - Landownership KW - Tenure of land KW - Land use, Rural KW - Real property KW - Land, Nationalization of KW - Landowners KW - Serfdom KW - History KW - India KW - Kings and rulers. KW - Arts and Humanities UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:85473672 AB - This book examines the politics and culture of landholding in eastern India. Professor McLane explores the dual and sometimes conflicting roles of the zamindars, the landed chiefs, in eighteenth-century western Bengal during the decline of the Mughal empire and the rise of the British hegemony. He focuses on zamindari rent extraction, techniques of coercion, and the meaning of gift-giving and gift-receiving. He shows how the zamindars kept alive the rituals, patronage, and other traditions of normative Hindu kingship for their subjects in the villages while they extracted revenue from the peasantry and intermediate gentry for the government of the Mughals and then the English East India Company. He argues that the increased commercialization and efforts to maximize land revenues imposed severe strains on the paternalistic and gift-oriented culture of Bengal's huge landlords. This analysis is illustrated with a case study of Bengal's most important and controversial zamindari, the Burdwan raj. ER -