Economic processes, ruralisation, and ethnic mutation: A study on the changing meanings of lusitanian space in India, 1780-1840

Abstract

The period between 1780 and 1840, which is often called the age of revolutions in the West, witnessed significant change in the Lusitanian space in India, due to radical alterations in the politico-economic activities and socio-ecclesiastical institutions. On the one hand, the commercial ventures that the Portuguese had officially maintained as their major economic activity for more than two centuries were relegated to the background or handed over to the Saraswat Brahmins of Goa and some private entrepreneurs. On the other hand, the Portuguese state in India began to focus more on agriculture as a means of sustaining itself against the backdrop of intensified threats from the British encroaching on their peripheral commerce. The agrarian policy of the Portuguese Prime Minister Marques de Pombal to acquire new cultivable territories and expand agriculture had already brought several neighbouring areas of Goa, under the Portuguese control during the period between 1763 and 1783, which were named New Conquests. This was followed by the establishment of a Department of Agriculture in 1776 to supervise cultivation and to introduce new crops, such as pepper, cotton and areca-nuts in Goa and in the newly conquered territories. At the same time that the king of Portugal fled from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro and began to rule the metropolis and its colonies from Brazil, following severe threats from Napoleonic wars, the Portuguese possessions in India—particularly in Goa—were moving towards increasing ruralisation. The Department of Agriculture even clamoured for the closure of the municipal councils of Goa, and also for the liquidation of the gaonkar system (communal ownership of land) that would facilitate distribution of land to enterprising individuals to increase production and to make Goa self-sustaining.