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For 19th-century British officials, peasant indebtedness was a cause of worry: it was a sign of poverty and a likely reason for the lack of dynamism in agriculture. Behind all peasant revolts, officials saw a long history of inherited debts, the machinations of usurers, and consequent land alienations. In nationalist discourse, indebtedness was evidence of peasants' impoverishment caused by high levels of state revenue demand. 20th-century British officials like Malcolm Darling invented the poverty thesis. It was not poverty, wrote Darling, but prosperity - the increased power to borrow - that led to the accumulating volume of debt. This was a picture reassuring to the official mind. Discussions on rural credit have now moved away from the simple issue of poverty and prosperity. The essays in the volume reflect proliferating horizons among historians of rural credit. In his introduction, Sugata Bose reflects upon the issues which underlie discussions of credit and markets.
He argues that it is possible to understand complex agrarian relations in colonial India only by breaking out of the neat dichotomies which are frequently posited: continuity and change, prosperity and poverty, reciprocity and resistance, freedom and bondage.
