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Colonial And Post-Colonial Origins Of Agrarian Development: The Case Of Two Punjabs, Shahram Azhar

Doctoral Dissertations

This study explores the colonial and post-colonial origins of agrarian development by looking at the role of historical institutions, class formations and the state (ICS) in shaping the process. It contributes to the “divergence debates” in economics, which make an attempt to explain the ‘fundamental causes’ of divergence between countries. While one strand of the divergence literature presents the process as being functional to ‘geography’, a second strand focuses on the institutional legacies of colonialism; what is common to both sets of explanations, however, is the view that future outcomes are completely pre-determined by one or another time-invariant factor, leading …