Preet S. Aulakh

As the British Empire consolidated its geographical possession of distant lands by the 19th century, the agrarian nature of its colonies necessitated careful considerations about land tenure relationships. After intense debates around property rights and political economy, several land laws were enacted across the Empire between 1868 and 1875, which recognised the proprietary rights of peasant cultivators. Empire and the Peasant Proprietor examines this transformative shift in the imperial approaches to land tenure. Through a comparative analysis of historical land tenure arrangements in three diverse colonial sites, Punjab, Ireland, and Prince Edward Island, the book identifies two crucial mechanisms which facilitated the institutionalisation of peasant proprietorship. One, there was a fortuitous ideological alignment between important governing agents in the three colonies. Two, the debate about the impact of land reform in the colonies on the 'sanctity' of English principles was redirected, allowing for inter-colony analogies and precedents to support the proprietary rights of peasant cultivators. Empire and the Peasant Proprietor demonstrates the importance of these reciprocal influences within the imperial system and provides insight into contemporary challenges of secure land rights for a large proportion of the global population that continues to be dependent on agriculture for sustenance. This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

Increased governance of international trade through supra-national institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) has meant that national trade and organisational strategies need to be compatible with the norms of global institutions. Global institutional change impacts national economies and necessitates adaptation in ways that balance adherence to emerging norms while maintaining broad socioeconomic national objectives. This book focuses on two sector-specific global institutional changes initiated and implemented by the WTO in 2005 and examines how India's textile and pharmaceutical industries coped with these changes through coordinated efforts in the multi-level national institutional system comprised of the state, industry and individual business organisations. The findings of the book, which show both convergence and divergence across the two industries in the processes and outcomes of dealing with global institutional change, would be of interest to national policymakers as well as to scholars in multiple disciplines interested in the study of institutions and institutional change.