ORISSA^S ECONOMY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 49 few years, resulting in large-scale relapse of land to thicket and jungle.84 In Midnapur also., in the forest tracts of Salbandi and Keshpur thanas, cultivable land reverted into sal jungles after 1875.85 The increase of rice cultivation by 30 per cent brought no rapid economic growth for Orissa. Export of rice was harmful to the domestic economy and the pressure from above forced the cultivators to sell their harvests at cheap rates without leaving a margin for requirements of consumption and seeds. Prices of rice in the nineteenth century did not show any steady upward trend., but slight fluctuations in the grain markets were caused by the natural calamities.86 There was a decrease in the productivity of the land in the absence of scientific manuring which demands more capital input, and reduction in the area of land for each family owing to the steady rise of population. It was shown both by Maddox and Banerjee that each family of five persons did not own more than five acres of land. For them, after 1837, there was no alternative but to take loans in money and grain from the surplus farmers and the subsistence farmers.87 The Mahalwari system of land revenue was the root of many evils in the agrarian system in Orissa after 1837. It gave rise to the new features of absentee landlordism. The landed proprietors became an alien rent-collecting machinery, the raison d'etre of which was represented as the regular payment of land taxes to the colonial government and the appropriation of the surplus in buying imported colonial goods (which supported the foreign manufacturers but not the rural industries). The rural credit network also developed and intensified its exploitation in response to the increasing dependence of ryots and zamindars on moneylenders, who were more or less dependent on the urban mahajans and indigenous banking houses and wholesale merchants. The new judicial regulations and machinery for settling land disputes, which gave rise to the emergence of an urban lawyer class, also drained away the agrarian surplus income to the towns. Moreover, if the evidence colleectd in Hunter's Statistical Accounts is to be relied on, it seems probable that in many cases rents rose faster than prices in the nineteenth century. Moreover, increased cost of cultivation with diminishing fertility of the soil made agriculture relatively unprofitable, although lack of statistical data prevents a conclusive verdict on this subject. In the latter half of the nineteenth century the crisis in the agrarian economy of Orissa made the position of the peasantry most miserable. In the absence of rapid industrialization, the urban market for agricultural products remained relatively static, the ratio between the urban and rural population remaining practically unchanged. Orissa throughout the century remained predominantly rural and its expanding grain trade was constrained by the terrible poverty and backwardness of the villagers. Marx has correctly noticed that this work of spoliation of Orissa and the rest of India became the main source of the primary accumulation of