Rural Land Markets and Accumulation in an Agrarian Periphery: A class-relational approach to rentierism in India

Land markets are an increasingly significant byproduct of industrialisation in neoliberal India, but accumulation possibilities for rural classes through speculation are uneven. Trajectories through rents are determined not just by the social relations in impacted villages but crucially by the historically determined dynamics of the wider regional economy. This article examines the patterns of differentiation following two decades of land dispossession for industrial infrastructure development in a peripheralised region of western India. The combination of production and circulation through land markets here enables accumulation that is petty (in size) and ‘provincial’ (in terms of linkages and spatial expanse) for surplus-generating capitalist farmers. Overall patterns of accumulation through rents show a fettering of agrarian capital within the rural, the explanation for which lies in the specificities of capitalist development of the wider region, which constrain expanded reproduction through urban sites. Dispossession for manufacturing hubs and the more dispersed industrial infrastructure in the neoliberal era not only increases rural inequalities but does little to ameliorate regional disparities.