2 - Hove prints, commons and reclamation: Examining the colonial attack on the livestock economy to resuscitate the land settlements in India 1860-1900s.

Presentation Abstract
The mid 19 th century evoked a crisis for the colonial empire because a series of famines and
political revolts in the agrarian north stalled an ambitious land settlement policy that had
commenced in the late 18 th and early 19 th century. The proposed paper examines the
relationship between the juridical notions of ‘settlement’ and ‘agro-pastoral’ work, especially
since the later shares a history of mobility through variegated ecologies in India. The paper
shows how by privileging the idea of ‘settlement’ a juridical periphery is constituted which
represents a multitude of castes associated with livestock and cattle work. Coming in the
wake of the mutiny of 1857 and the famine and cattle plagues of 1860 the juridical distinction
obscures punitive criminalisation against cattle work. Ricardian concerns that fuel empire’s
ambitious grain exports results in new scientific rationalities that reconvenes the criminalised
periphery as ‘allied’ (animal husbandry) to land productivity. The paper concludes by
showing how the attack on cattle work diminishes the claims of a vast demography to
colonial representative spaces. It marks the ascendence of economism as a vehicle for
broader and even nationalist articulations, where cow protection and food sovereignty emerge
as rational economistic idioms of a post -colonial state.