Editorial Note, Mar-Apr, 2013

This issue of Social Scientist focuses on the diversities associated with historical research. Urmita Ray’s ‘Subsistence Crises in Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century Bihar’ explores the subsistence crisis that affected the agrarian economy of eastern India during this transitional phase. Historians like Paul Greenough advocate the ‘breakdown’ thesis and regard the famine as a shock to the traditional system of subsistence security. Differing with this argument, Ray sees this to be the result of structural contradictions in Bihar’s peasant society. As argued, this can be traced to the dominant peasant groups who controlled land and owned capital at the expense of the increasing subordination of the poor peasantry and rural indebtedness. In this context, she sees the subsistence crises to be ‘cases of major entitlement failure’.