Famine and the Making of a Property Regime: Towards a Rationale for British Rule in Kashmir, 1870s–1890s

The extant economic history of Jammu and Kashmir largely neglects the impact of the famine of 1877–78 which re-oriented the traditional occupational patterns to form new livelihood alternatives and labour regimes derivative of colonial rule. Such histories focus rather on major economic changes like land assessments, which were introduced in 1889, to trace such shifts.