Antecedents of the Green Revolution: Agricultural Science in British India, c. 1870–1950

This project seeks to look at the ways in which ideas of agrarian science and rural reconstruction were utilized by a range of experts in British India through the early decades of the 20th century. Straddling mutiple domains across regional, Imperial and global networks, specific sites of agrarian research sought to consider the intertwined questions of agrarian productivity and rural uplift. The actors involved in these projects ranged from Colonial officials and Imperial experts to American missionaries and enthusiastic rulers of various Indian princely states. The projects considers the ways in which these diverse actors, motivated by particular often divergent agendas, sought to grapple with the question of agrarian and rural distress through the prism of science. Through an examination of a range of archival material in India, Britain and the US, the project shall attempt to sketch out the contours of British colonial agrarian policy, and the multifaceted imperatives that not only shaped Imperial policy, but also set the tone for the developmentalist direction undertaken by the postcolonial Indian state through the 1950s and beyond.