This interesting book critically analyzes the agrarian and environmental history of the Ganga-Jamuna Doab region. The observations of Morris D Morris and the Cambridge School of South Asian historiography stand criticized as imperialist and colonialist. Accordingly, the welfare of the society was never the object of the British Raj as Morris suggests. Nor was the colonial state an outcome of the indigenous despotic system independent of the headquarters in London as Chris Bayly, David Washbrook and company surmise. What the latter two fail to notice is that the British colonial state in India was starkly characterized by its close links to the British Empire, rigorous collection of revenue, and transformation of agriculture.

How did colonial capitalism bring about this transformation and what impact did it have on the land and its environment? This is principally the story of this book. Apparently, in the pre-colonial times the concept of land ownership was ambiguous. The problem was with labor shortage and not land availability. The subsistence economies as it existed in India for thousands of years were neither stagnant nor static. It was firmly rooted and integrated with available natural resources. The emphasis of agriculture was on productive self-sufficiency combined with a high degree of ecological vigilance. Cereals took precedence over cash crops. The irrigation system was primarily based on wells. And these wells were filled with renewed seepage from annual monsoon cycle. "Well irrigation proves to be the most efficient and ecologically appropriate form of irrigation, since the water is used in sensible quantities, the soil is not flooded and is generally not exploited" (p. 99). So, the pre-colonial agriculture in the Doab was not only efficient but also surrounded with thick bushes, jungles, groves, and forests. Being the heart of the Mughal Empire, Central Doab was prosperous in pre-British times. It had incorporated an ingenious system of management, stockpiling, crop rotation, economical use of natural resources such as dung and water, and intensive use of human and animal labor. The fact of labor shortage and land abundance meant that landownership had little market value despite the existence of the land market. But in the early 19^th century, intense commercialization of the economy by the British rapidly destroyed this age-old dynamic subsistence system and replaced it with a colonial system.

British Rule on Indian Soil: North India in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, system, colonial, irrigation, agriculture, British, Morris, precolonial, transformation, Cambridge, capitalism, characterized, commercialization, colonialist, criticized, ecological, environment, economies, headquarters, historiography, independent, ambiguous