F.— ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND STATISTICS 121 



short, it is prudent to avoid running around the villages, as the hungry 

 Armenians do, and better to buy in the town ' from the substantial 

 Hindu or Moslem merchants who live there and have been many years 

 in the trade, and who have made advances against indigo some months 

 beforehand, binding the debtors to sell to no one else.' 3 The European 

 planters took the place of the Indian merchants and something more : 

 for they set up factories in the areas of supply and manufactured the 

 raw produce by improved machinery, drawing on the personnel and prac- 

 tice of the West Indies. Like Samuel Oldknow in eighteenth-century 

 Lancashire, they advanced from merchant capitalism to factory owner- 

 ship. As the land was already in the hands of the ryot, they were not 

 able to set up the slave plantation system, in which the planter owns and 

 operates both factory and land ; and they endeavoured to ensure supplies 

 by intensifying the debtor relationship which existed already between 

 native merchants and native cultivators. They made advances of money 

 which gave them a lien on the ryots' crop at a fixed price and reinforced 

 their position as creditor by acquiring zemindar (landlord) rights over 

 the cultivator. Sons succeeding to their fathers' property and debts 

 inherited, so they believed, the compulsion to grow indigo. This was 

 what the ryots detested and the planters desired ; for, as one of the latter 

 observed in i860, ' to encourage any ryot to pay off his balance would be 

 virtually to close the factory.' 4 The situation became intolerable when 

 the planters, having formed a Planters' Association, divided up the terri- 

 tory and maintained a fixed price which was much below the cost of 

 production at a time when other crops and the expenses of cultivation in 

 labour and draught animals were rising rapidly. The result was a 

 growers' strike, accompanied by disorders, which led to the appointment 

 of a Royal Commission, and its Report of i860 is a document of the first 

 importance. It shows that the planters had been guilty of illegal seizures 

 and detentions of ryots, and that the contract to grow, though believed to 

 be hereditary, was not really so. It evinced a determination to protect 

 the peasant, but was so dominated by current doctrines of non-interference 

 that it was opposed both to penal legislation against the cultivator and to 

 any protective legislation in his favour that ' fetters the free agency of 

 the contracting parties.' 5 



But throughout the nineteenth century the indigo planters owned some 

 land and to that extent were true planters. This was called Nij-joti 

 (' it may be likened in some respects to a home farm managed by the 

 proprietor of an estate in England '), 6 and the majority of it was on land 

 of new alluvial formation annually inundated and occurring mainly in 

 Eastern Bengal. On this class of land indigo was the crop most suited 

 to the soil, and there were few disorders here in i860. But so long as the 

 ryot was compelled to deliver indigo at much less than the cost of pro- 

 duction, the major part of the supply was virtually subsidised, and the 

 Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, in commenting on the findings of the 



3 F. Pelsaert, Jahangir's India, ed. Moreland, p. 16. 



* Report of Indigo Commission, Parliamentary Papers, 1861, xliv. s. 109. 



5 Ibid., s. 188. 



•* Ibid., S. 20. 



