56 SOCIAL SCIENTIST like indigo, mw cotton, opium, oilseeds, sugarcane, wheat, and jute forced the peasants to switch over to and increase the production of these crops. In addition, the integration of the rural economy with the world market and the fluctuating demand therein affected prices and incomes of the peasants. The usurer's grip was, therefore, strengthened by these processes. Rates of interest of the usurers varied from region to region. But, once in the clutches of the usurers, there was no way out for the peasants. Some late nineteenth century surveys reveal the extent of indebtedness among the peasantary. In Punjab 83 percent of the rural population was in debt and the average indebtedness was Rs. 76 per head.8 Intensive village surveys revealed that in parts of Madras 90 per cent of the agricultural population was in debt, the amount varying between Rs. 35 and Rs. 900 per family.9 Indebtedness and consequent loss of 'rights' of the small peasantry was a universal phenomenon in the countryside.10 Voluntary sales of raiyati holdings in Bengal alone in 1881-82 were 50.500.11 Therefore, land revenue policies of the state, in particular, and the adverse consequences of usurious capital, in general, conjointedly operated to separate the peasant from land. Wakeficld's theory of "systematic colonisation19 rested on the policy of "manufacture of wageworkers in the Colonies".12 And the State gave effect to this theory. The Commissioner of Assam instructed in 1861 : I see very well that the land taxes here are almost nominal; that they might be doubled... At present we take very little from the Assamese, and we do very little for him. We do not intercept the bounty of nature on the one hand; on the other hand, we do not lead him to look for more than nature provides, and place him in communication with the outer-world, and put him in the way of acquiring new material wants. The' result is that he remains an indolent, sensual non-progressive being.13 Therefore, to make the peasantry "progressive" and force him te acquire "new material wants", land revenue was raised to evict him from land and thereby transform him into a "productive" being. In England the process of "primitive accumulation", expropriating the small peasant from land, was an essential condition of capitalist industrialisation. On the contrary, in India, the very process of primitive accumulation strengthened the basis of capitalist imperialism. Expansion of industrialisation in Britain set forth the process of integration of the colonies in accordance with the new demands of the industrial metropolis. Being potential reservoirs of varied resources these were to be exploited by the employment of labour in certain 'appropriate' fields. As the English trade with the colonies resembled the traffic between town and country,14 the latent objective of the colonial State, in India, was the mobilisation of and supply of labour to the principal centres of production.