The Socio-Economic Consequences of Colonial Market Integration in Kamrup, 1860-1947

Abstract

This article examines the socio-economic consequences of colonial market integration in Kamrup between 1860 and 1947. Existing scholarship on colonial Assam has been shaped largely by studies of tea, migration, frontier governance, and provincial politics. Although these works have transformed the field, they have left an analytical gap at the district level, especially in relation to how market integration altered agrarian life, urban growth, social hierarchy, and cultural practice in Kamrup. This article addresses that gap by treating market integration not as a neutral expansion of trade but as a historical process through which colonial power reorganized circulation, revenue, labor, and everyday life. Methodologically, it adopts a conceptual historical approach, synthesizing the Kamrup district gazetteer, work on nineteenth-century Assam's political economy, recent scholarship on commerce and river transport, studies of Guwahati's colonial market geography, and literature on print, migration, and social differentiation in colonial Assam. The article argues that colonial market integration in Kamrup had a double effect. It expanded connectivity through waterways, bazaars, municipal planning, and commercial circuits, but it also deepened uneven development by monetizing peasant life, strengthening merchant and intermediary groups, reordering urban space, and producing new forms of social and cultural stratification. Kamrup did not simply become "more commercial." It was reconstituted as a nodal district within an imperial economy whose benefits and burdens were distributed unequally. The article contributes to the historiography of colonial northeastern India by showing that the district scale is crucial for understanding how economic integration generated durable social consequences.