The 1772 Revenue Experiment: Warren Hastings and the Ijaradari System

In 1772, Warren Hastings, the East India Company's first governor-general, inherited a Bengal in chaos. The Company had won at Plassey and Buxar, but the revenue system was a patchwork of corrupt Naib Dewans and warring zamindars. Hastings, fresh from the Madras presidency, saw a solution: bypass the zamindars entirely and auction the right to collect taxes to the highest bidder through a system called ijaradari. He believed this would squeeze more silver from Bengal's peasants, but the experiment backfired catastrophically. The ijaradars, who were often the very zamindars he'd tried to sideline, now had no long-term stake in the land—just a one-year lease to extract as much as possible. Within a decade, the backlash forced Hastings's successor, Lord Cornwallis, to abandon the experiment and lock the zamindars into permanent ownership through the notorious Permanent Settlement of 1793. This episode unpacks the forgotten revenue experiment that shaped Bengal's agrarian misery for a century, and shows how a well-intentioned administrative fix became a textbook case of colonial extraction. Lucas and Luna also discuss the legacy of ijaradari in present-day Bangladesh's land reforms.

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