66 SOCIAL SCIENTIST to present a coherent picture of the organization ofj.ite cultivation and of its changing forms, which was a direct result of the changing methods of financing jute cultivation. The production aspect is interlinked with the question of financing c'jltivation and the implications which the latter has for the disposal of the crop and the income which it represented. Such an understanding is important because it would tell us something about the nature of control implicit in the dadani system of financing agriculture and how far the choice element was present for the grower in accepting or rejecting such a dadan. Finally, an understanding of how backward agriculture reacts to a predominantly export oriented industrialization would provide us with some clues about the relationship between the growers, the various strata of intermediaries, the mills and the foreign interests and would enable us to formulate some interesting and, we hope, meaningful questions as far as the interlocking of merchants5, industrial and foreign capital is concerned in the jute industry. The Traditional Form The traditional form of production organization in Bengal could be described as small peasant farming, although it had two characteristic features: 1) Peasant families whose individual holdings formed units of cultivation, did not "rent93 land from ^amindars on short leases resumable by the ^amindars when they liked, but more or less continuously occupied it (without having, inmost cases, any explicit contract with the ^amindar); 2) Peasant families themselves organized the Cultivation of their lands. Family labour was sometimes supplemented by co-operative communal labour and by a small quantity of paid labour. The necessary capital was the peasant's small surplus, ploughs and catties and loans from the village moneylender and the grain dealers. These loans did not in any way interfere (in most cases) with the peasant's choice of crops to grow. The only two crops, whose cultivation required a revision of this framework were tea and indigo. Such a framework docs not imply that in the pre-1793 period all land was more or less equally distributed among the households of the village, so that some kind of a self-sufficient subsistence village economy existed. In fact, in the eighteenth century, rent was collected by the Bengal ^amindars mainly in cash—cash acquired by peasant households by the marketing of various cash crops. Cash crop cultivation (such as tea, indigo, sugar), organized money markets and the development of internal trade and the highly monetized commercial transactions had brought about considerable