BRITISH INDIGO 69 capable of producing indigo for remittance, if remittance was the sole concern. This leads us to examine the differences in the technology and the organization of production between the UI and British systems. It is generally argued that the British introduced new machinery and managerial expertise.3 In particular, the government support to British planters was justified on the basis that West Indian technology was superior to native technology and that British plantations would emulate this superior technology. No evidence exists however that British hardware was superior to UI hardware.4 There were significant differences, on the other hand, in the organization of production between the two systems. In Agra, individual cultivators produced indigo, and used some degree of cooperation at village level for the extraction of the dye. In Gujarat, cultivation was mostly done by individual farmers, and dye was extracted by middlemen who also marketed the final product,6 The scale of operation was small both in the case of peasants extracting dye collectively or middlemen extracting dye after purchasing indigo plants from cultivators. No evidence exists that any coercion was used by the parties involved in the UI system, British plantations, on the other hand, operated on a large scale.6 In fact, these were the first large organizations to operate in rural India which were not military or religious in^nature. Each plantation had a large number of permanent employees, godowns, factory establishments, and recurring expenditure on managers' comfort.7 All this meant commitment to large overheads. Their mode of operation was characterized by a routine use of coercion, on which there is no dearth of evidence.8 The legal relationship between planters and cultivators differed across regions, and even within a region, depending on whether the cultivator was a tenant of the factory, or bound by a lease, or a wage labourer; and whether the land was owned by the factory or leased by the factory from a landlord. Regardless of these differences, the planter employed coercion to impose indigo on cultivators and to keep them bound to the system as long as possible. Legal and illegal forces were used for plainly exploitative purposes, such as 1) to extract the best land and labour for indigo; 2) to pay the lowest possible price for output; 3) to impose all risks of crop failure on the cultivator; 4) to invoke assumed ^amindari (landlord's) rights for underpaying or not paying cultivators for supporting services^ 5) to use improper measuring and weighting systems for land and