This dissertation provides a historical dimension to development studies by tracing, for one region, the emergence of official and popular discourses on rural poverty and "backwardness" and the prospect of their amelioration through science, social science and technology. Combining social, economic and environmental history with the history of science and ideas, and employing diverse sources (such as testimony presented to proliferating state commissions, landlords' diaries, theses of students sent abroad for scientific training, poetry and fiction) I attempt to reconstruct the material and cultural circumstances in which a modernizing vision for the countryside was taken up in colonial Bengal, a process reflecting the complex interplay between both global and local forces, and dynamic understandings of region and nation. The experience of famine (and the specter of it elsewhere) spurred increasingly regular interest and intervention in rural conditions by the state and local elites, and discourses on episodic crises gave way to considerations of poverty. Solutions mooted first involved attempts to extend the (productive) agricultural frontier through the promotion of migration and plough cultivation among indigenous peoples.After the turn of the century, diverse groups sought to improve villages and villagers using scientific and social scientific tools. Technological change, from the largest (railways) to the smallest (seeds) presented differential costs and opportunities, reflecting changing rural power relations, in which rising actors included not only an increasingly interventionist state but also ascendant entrepreneurial elites and transnational businesses. Rather than present any simple transmission of metropolitan ideals and instruments from one elite to another, the dissertation shows how Britons and Bengalis alike participated in emergent international intellectual and economic networks. The middle class's engagement with ideas of rural development were strongly influenced by regional environments and identities--considerations also shaped the response of peasants to the initiatives putatively enacted in their interest. The vicissitudes of village uplift in the colonial period clearly anticipate the contours of development work after independence, and this history must inform our attempts to engage constructively with rural South Asia.
