Vol. 7, Issue 2, Part D (2025)

This article examines the trajectory of colonial land revenue policies in Bengal from the establishment of the Dual Administration in 1765 to the introduction of the Permanent Settlement in 1793. It foregrounds the shifting logic of governance in which experimentation coexisted with an increasing desire for administrative fixity. The study begins with the Company’s reliance on the nāib-naẓīm and indigenous revenue functionaries, a strategy shaped as much by fiscal expediency as by the Company’s interpretation of its newly acquired dīwānī rights. Through analysis of the Hastings-Barwell Plan, Francis’s proposals, and Cornwallis’s eventual settlement, the article demonstrates how early colonial revenue schemes oscillated between models of auction, farming, and proprietary settlement, often drawing upon Mughal and Nawabi precedents while simultaneously reworking them to suit imperial fiscal imperatives. The debates leading to the Permanent Settlement reveal the Company’s anxieties regarding financial rationalization, its mistrust of zamindars, and its evolving conception of sovereignty. By situating these policies within the broader historiography of colonial state formation, the article highlights how the transition from experimentation to fixity signaled not merely a fiscal strategy but a decisive reconfiguration of agrarian relations in late eighteenth-century Bengal.