4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST lords and over-lords and between different types of lords and the state. Therefore, hardly any surplus was left for expanded reproduction. This can be termed as feudal production relations. The village artisans were self employed and catered to the local needs. The Indian handicrafts which by the eighteenth century had attained world wide acclaim, prospered around the feudal courts and seats of power and were patronised by the ruling classes. Here, either the craftsmen worked under a master craftsman or there was widespread use of the 'putting-out9 system of production. British policy was essentially aimed at the destruction of Indian handicrafts so as to secure a market for the industrial output of Britain and extraction of surplus value for military expenses in India and industrial investment at home. Therefore, colonial policy allowed the agrarian structure to remain almost the same except that the plivate armies (except in native states) were abolished. The land rights were enforced by a bourgeois legal system. A bourgeois superstructure was imposed on feudal 'production relations'. Therefore, in the rural areas the mode of appropriation of surplus during colonial rule period was through feudal land revenue, land rent and petty feudal exactions and an increasing scale of usury. As usury, which arose out of chronic poverty, became an important method of exercising control over the direct producers (in view of the absence of private armies), the rural oligarchy had developed a vested interest in keeping the direct producers in abject poverty and, therefore, remained inimical to overall development. The essential approach was not to maximise return on land but to maximise hold on direct producers.4 Not that force was not used or that musclemen were not employed to control the direct producers, but these were used in collusion with and with the support of the functionaries of the British administration, the police, the judiciary and the executive. The autonomy of the rural rich in this context was somewhat reduced, but eventually they collaborated with imperialism. There was another aspect of feudal 'production relations' which was different from West European feudalism. Even during the pre-colonial days tenancy rights, by and large, were hereditary and implied limited occupancy rights. Because of this and the British policy of de-ifiditstrialisation and thwarting capitalist development outside agriculture which increased pressure on land, proletarianisation in the Marxist sense oftfie term, also did not take place. Th6 pr^-British trend in expansion of commodity production got a boo^t because of colonial policy. Its concern was opening of the Indian lAaA^t for British manufacture in exchange for primary products. In ordfet t6 increase surplus appropriation, it tilted the terms of trade heavily agarihst primary products, specially agriculture. This led to widespread pauperism amofig direct producers in agriculture and robbed this sector of any significant private investment and strengthened the feudal institutions. That is why some of us term it as 'semi-feudal production relations'. Even