Value in Motion: Infrastructure, Perenniality, and the Production of Punjab, 1870-1940

Abstract

This dissertation examines how steam power transformed the political economy and ecologies of agriculture in colonial India. It argues that the infrastructure revolution of the late nineteenth century accelerated the circulation of capital and commodities, reducing and regularizing turnover times. As a result, the seasonal, rain-fed rhythms of cultivation increasingly served as a fetter on the imperial economy, subjecting commodity traders and the colonial state to new competitive pressures. Centered on the colonial province of Punjab but extending to Karachi, Aden, and the western Indian Ocean region, this study shows how perennial irrigation—the supply of year-round water through storage and release—emerged as a sociotechnical complement to the spatial and temporal affordances of steam propulsion, turning intermittent hydrological flow into a stable, calculable “stock” suited to capital’s demand for constant, expanding throughput. Perenniality, in this sense, was a fix for the disjunct temporalities of cultivation and steam-powered circulation—one that reorganized agrarian space and society while generating new social and ecological contradictions. The dissertation develops this argument across four chapters. The first chapter offers a new account of the political economy of capitalism in colonial India, showing how a “mercantile-finance-logistics complex” sought greater investment in and control over circulatory infrastructures, binding India’s small peasant economy ever more tightly to metropolitan markets. The second chapter examines the “duty of water”—a measure of irrigation efficiency—and theorizes the emergence of a historically specific, transimperial logic of perenniality, tracing its economic, material, and infrastructural expressions from North India to Egypt to California. It homes in on the Punjab canal colonies to show how a combination of irrigation and steam transportation infrastructures reshaped the agrarian economy, creating a caste-based society of commodity producers while sharpening economic unevenness in the region. The third chapter develops an “agrarian question of circulation.” It follows wheat, Punjab’s main agricultural commodity, to the port of Karachi and shows how the port’s development unfolded in tandem with irrigation-led agricultural expansion in Punjab. Through this historical geography, it shows that “circulation” was itself constitutive of the relations of production. The fourth chapter turns to soil salinization, or reh, a consequence of perennial irrigation, which was understood as a crisis by irrigation engineers but never acted upon. Through a microhistory of colonial scientific investigations, it theorizes this structure of disavowal and attributes it to the infrastructural lock-in of perennial irrigation, which resulted from its consonance with the transforming economic imperatives of the colonial state. By tracing the unexpected relations between steam transportation, merchants, irrigation, and crisis, this dissertation argues that the colonial pursuit of perenniality emerged as an agrarian complement to a new fossil-based temporality of circulation in the late nineteenth century. It shows that transformations in the agrarian periphery were not incidental to the fossil-based economy but constitutive of its worldwide expansion.