hand, generally required much higher administrative costs and burdens,

but had the advantage of being more systematic, and was seen by liberals
as both ethically and economically superior.
The British were especially enthusiastic about the system of taxation. In
India, they introduced the Permanent Settlement of 1793, which took
away the administrative prerogatives of the old landed elite in Bengal, the
zamindars, but turned their loose landholding rights into strict private
property, dependent however on their capacity to pay the fixed amount
of revenue for their land and tenants.55 This agreement clearly reflected
prevailing British ideas about the social, economic and political importance
of a stable landed gentry, owning their land in an absolute and exclusive
manner, and dedicated to improving their property; the whole system,
as Bernard Cohn observes,was intended to encourage improvement
of the land . . . to protect property rights and make property secure.56
The British did not stop with the Permanent Settlement, of course.
The nineteenth century also saw the extension of private property rights
to other parts of India, often by Indians with British encouragement or
assistance.57 Similar policies were also adopted outside India. Following
their invasion of Java in 1811, for example, the British under Lieutenant
Governor Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles tried to introduce the same kind
of land-rent system to Indonesia.
After the Charter of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) expired
in 1799, some Dutch liberals had already begun to press for the establishment
of a system of secure private property, and Raffles took these
visions further, ambitiously planning to gain revenue through, as in India,
the introduction of a systematic land tax. He began from the convenient
proposition that in Java the indigenous ruler had always been the owner
of the soil, and that the Europeans had taken over this right: effectively
all the land on the island was in the public domain. 58 This allowed the
government freely to dispose of the uncultivated waste lands, whether to
Javanese or Europeans. Thus, while claiming that the government enjoyed
the sole right of property, Raffles also established a commercial relationship
directly with the individual settlers, ignoring intermediaries in the
Maarten Kuitenbrouwer, Aristocracies under Colonial Rule: North India and Java, in
C.A. Bayly and D.H.A. Kolff (eds.), Two Colonial Empires: Comparative Essays on the
History of India and Indonesia (Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986), p. 80. For a good
analysis of the impact of this and other reforms on India, see Rajat Kanta Ray, Indian
Society and the Establishment of British Supremacy, in Marshall (ed.), Oxford History
of the British Empire, vol. II, especially p. 521.
56 Bernard Cohn, From Indian Status to British Contract, Journal of Economic History,
21 (1961), 613.
57 C.A. Bayly, Creating a Colonial Peasantry: India and Java, c. 18201880, Itinerario, 11
(1987), 946.
58 Day, Dutch in Java, p. 176.
55