The labour process in agrarian production marked by its familial character was encumbered by various forms of appropriation imposed upon it. The extraction of surplus value produced by peasant labour in the forms of rent, interest and profit occurred during the century following the grant of the Diwani to the Company in 1765 within a primary framework of the colonial state's land revenue demand. The impact of the colonial land revenue demand on the well-being of India's peasantry has been a subject of political and scholarly disagreement ever since the later nineteenth century. The involvement of money lending landlords in the rice market blurred the distinction between trading and usury capital. Straddling the domain of the economic and the political, shifting relations of appropriation both sought to define and were acted upon by the mental world of the exploited. A mode of exploitation, even during an apparently unchallenged period of its domination, did not preside over a pulverized consciousness.

This bibliography presents a list of reference articles that enable reader to understand peasant labour and colonial capital in rural Bengal in India since 1770. Scholars of colonial India have long been entranced by the intractable problem of 'land tenure', and enamoured of the age-old institution of 'village communities'. The relationship between population and production from the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century has been the subject of enquiry of both contemporary reports and articles and more recent scholarly publications. The level and burden of the colonial land revenue demand in the nineteenth century have now exercised and agitated four generations of scholars and polemicists. Peasant resistance in colonial India in general, and Bengal in particular, has been the theme on which there has been the most prolific historical writing in the past twenty-five years.