Settling for the state: Pastoralists and colonial rule in southwestern Panjab, 1840--1900 (India, Pakistan)

Colonization and sedentarization formed the same narrative in southwestern Panjab, writing the shift in discursive production from lineage to state over the spatial, material, and cultural transformation from herding to cultivating society. The dynamics of class among pastoralists in southwestern Panjab provided the framework for the variable pathways and outcomes of localized power transactions among Panjabis and British that produced the colonial state. The transition from irregular payment to regular taxation and from animal to land capital formed the most important mechanisms of social change in the nineteenth century. In both cases the ruling elites of the precolonial and the colonial states attempted to persuade pastoralists to participate in the discourses which produced the state. British efforts of sedentarization and state-building succeeded because the exclusionary character of property in land under British law allowed pastoral chiefs to make permanent claims for control of pasture and water. Poorer herders threw in their lot with the state as they became legally and physically excluded from pasture and as their leaders became functionaries of the state and powerful landlords. By according analytical primacy to power transactions at their most local level, this study allows scholars to detach colonialism from its metanarratives, of both the imperialist and nationalist varieties, and to explore a rich middle ground between studies that segregate social and cultural causation.