'Making Property: Enclosure, Commerce, and Hereditary Right in Early Colonial Madras'

<strong>Centre for Historical Studies School of Social Sciences</strong> a Lecture <strong>'Making Property: Enclosure, Commerce, and Hereditary Right in Early Colonial Madras'</strong> <strong>Dr. Bhavani Raman</strong> Department of History, University of Toronto, Canada <strong>23rd March 2016</strong> From the turn of the nineteenth century the East India Company in Madras began to intervene in land transactions to strengthen a notion of property derived from land alienation against the natural right to property derived from its appropriation through labor. This talk will explore how such an elaboration of property allowed the Company's sovereign powers to emerge as a land developer. Using the prism of land development to understand the practices of making property it will revisit some enduring themes in the history of land use in modern India such as enclosure, land acquisition, and hereditary rights in land. Bhavani Raman is an Associate Professor at the Department of History, University of Toronto, Canada. She researches Southern India's early colonial histories, histories of security and land law, and the wider Tamil world. She is the author of Document Raj: Scribes and Writing in Early Colonial India (Permanent Black, 2015). She is currently researching offences against the state in Madras Presidency's frontier areas in the early ninetieth century.