On Vivek Chibber, Political Marxism, and the Tradition of Telling Half the Story
February 27, 2026
Over the last year we’ve received a number of responses to Vivek Chibber’s work. Given that many of these responses raise issues of broad strategic and theoretical interest, we’ve decided to publish two of them as the beginning of a dossier. We hope these pieces will begin a developing conversation about materialist analysis and expect future contributions, both from submitting authors and members of our editorial board.
To read the first entry in the dossier see Hugo de Camps Mora’s “Beyond the Wage Relation.”1Hugo de Camps Mora, “Beyond the Wage Relation: A Marxist Response to Vivek Chibber’s Materialist Socialism,” Spectre, February 24, 2026, https://doi.org/10.63478/OFWA6M7S.
In a recent interview with Jacobin’s Melissa Naschek, Vivek Chibber argues that colonial plunder had nothing to do with the rise of capitalism. The rise of capitalism, he says, was a strictly local phenomenon, originating from the willful transformation of serfdom into a class structure organized around free wage labor and market imperatives in early modern England. For Chibber, Karl Marx’s allusion to colonialism as integral to primitive accumulation (PA) in the last section of Capital, volume 1, was merely a “rhetorical ploy” to rebut Adam Smith’s argument of frugality driving PA. Colonialism, “an abomination,” was driven by material gains, but it did not create capitalism. If it had, it would have done it for pre-British empires, namely Spain and Portugal.2Vivek Chibber, “Colonial Plunder Didn’t Create Capitalism,” interview by Melissa Naschek, Jacobin, December 14, 2025, https://jacobin.com/2025/12/colonialism-transition-feudalism-capitalism-history-economy.
True. Spanish and Portuguese colonialism did not feed into capitalist relations of production but feudal relations.3Of Marxists who argued along these lines—that the profits of colonial slavery flowed only into industrial investment in capitalist Britain, not the other European feudal empires (including France, Spain and Portugal)—Robin Blackburn stands out: “From the standpoint of Marx’s own notion of primitive accumulation, however, some of these forms of depredation did not promote truly capitalist accumulation because their profits were seized by rulers who spent them on their own aggrandizement, or adventurers who aspired to become landed aristocrats.” See Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern 1492–1800 (Verso Books, 2010), 514. And, yes, the early-modern English agrarian economic structure marked a decisive rupture in the history of capitalism, but can we reduce the entirety of the genesis story to a hyper-local, internalist moment? Moreover, all instances of colonization after this historical moment were essentially capitalist, unlike traditional colonialism that corresponded to feudal relations in the metropole.4This is not the place to get into debates about whether India or other colonies from the eighteenth century onward were feudal, semifeudal, or capitalist. I’ll rest my case with the help of Jairus Banaji, who, among others, takes a strong position for why British colonialism in India was very much situated within capitalism and debunks the oft-repeated semifeudalism myth, in his influential 1977 essay “Modes of Production in a Materialist Conception of History.” See Jairus Banaji, Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011), 45–101 (especially 94–101), https://doi.org/10.1163/ej.9789004183681.i-406. To consider these histories irrelevant, or at best secondary, to capitalism’s rise because they did not precede early modern England’s germinating moment of agrarian transformation—although, let’s not forget, Ireland did—is to carry out an array of historical and theoretical reductions.
Doing so means, at least, two interrelated things, both of which are connected to Chibber’s argument and the broader tradition of Political Marxism to which he increasingly associates. The first is to reduce Marx’s umbrella concept of the mode of production to one of its components, namely, forms of labor exploitation.5Terms like labor forms, labor regimes, forms of labor exploitation, and modes of labor exploitation will be used interchangeably.
Starting from Robert Brenner, one of the pioneers of Political Marxism, there has been a consistent theoretical exercise of centering the history of capitalism around social property relations, further reduced to forms of labor exploitation. The class struggle—first between the feudal elite and serfs, and then the dynamic between agrarian capitalists (commercial landlords and capitalist tenants) and direct producers (wage laborers)—become central to this account. These specific relations—or, as we will see, the wage-labor form—become the primary movers of history, detached not only from non-wage-labor forms of exploitation, but also the broader rhythms of the mode of production.
The second is to eliminate colonialism from the origin of capitalism, contracting the expansive spatio-temporal process of PA to its internal dimension—that is, to England and then western Europe. This not only leaves out half the story, but also confuses the internal component of PA with its totality. Such an account remains blinded to capitalism’s origins beyond rural England and in doing so equates a hyper-local part of the beginnings with the whole of the beginning.
I. Half a Story
The disagreements surrounding PA, or the origins of capitalism, can be usefully sifted along two broad axes: the continuities and discontinuities between PA and capitalism’s present dynamics; and the temporal and geographical locus of primitive accumulation.6I’ll use terms such as PA and the origins of capitalism interchangeably. Along the first axis, we can point to three sets of formulations. First, there is a lineage of thinkers such as Rosa Luxemburg, Peter Kropotkin, David Harvey, Silvia Federici, and Ian Angus, who assert that capitalism’s extraeconomic means of accumulation are ongoing and challenge the notion of PA as a one-off historical event.7Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (Routledge, 2003); Peter Kropotkin, “Western Europe,” in Kropotkin: “The Conquest of Bread” and Other Writings, ed. Marshall S. Shatz (Cambridge, 1995), 203–32, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139170734; David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford, 2005); Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia, 2004); See Ian Angus, “The Meaning of ‘So-Called Primitive Accumulation,’” Monthly Review, April 1, 2023, https://doi.org/10.14452/MR-074-11-2023-04_4, available at monthlyreview.org/2023/04/01/the-meaning-of-so-called-primitive-accumulation. Ian Angus even argues that primitive accumulation is Marx’s least understood irony, although palpable from the prefix “so-called.” Second, there is a relatively less influential but vibrant Marxist tradition of reading PA as an originating historical process that offered global capital not only the essential surplus base at its nascent stage, but also the means to expand spatially. Thinkers from this tradition, such as Aaron Jaffe, Raju Das, and Cinzia Arruzza, emphasize the transitional structure of PA without discounting the social reproduction of oppression in capitalist societies.8Aaron Jaffe, “The History and Afterlife of Marx’s ‘Primitive Accumulation,’” Historical Materialism 32, no. 3 (2024): 188–215, https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-bja10030; Raju Das, “David Harvey’s Theory of Accumulation by Dispossession: A Marxist Critique,” World Review of Political Economy 8, no. 4 (2017): 590–616, https://doi.org/10.13169/worlrevipoliecon.8.4.0590; “Readings and Mis-readings of Primitive Accumulation”, YouTube video, 2:01:20, posted by “Yale University,” January 21, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pTmpnf6PZY. Third, there are thinkers from the world-systems tradition, particularly Giovanni Arrighi, who situate PA within the hegemonic landscape of overlapping systemic cycles of accumulation (although Arrighi himself has taken distinct positions on the subject in different contexts).9Arrighi argues that Marx’s general formula of capital, Money-Commodity-Money Prime (MCM’) not only depicts the logic of capital’s valorization but also “a recurrent pattern of historical capitalism as world system.” At the heart of this pattern lies an alteration between a material expansion phase (MC) and a financial expansion phase (CM’), where the former involves money capital activating a mass of commodities, in the latter money capital “sets itself free” from the commodity form and the process proceeds along a new financial path. Together, the two phases constitute a full systemic cycle of accumulation (MCM’). Arrighi identifies four such cycles in the history of capitalism: a Genoese cycle (long fifteenth to sixteenth century); a Dutch cycle (long seventeenth century); a British cycle (long nineteenth century); and a US cycle (long twentieth century). See Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 6–9, 220.
The second axis—which concerns not only the when and where of the origins of capitalism, but also the tension between its local and the world-systemic origins—can be nonexhaustively divided into Political Marxism, the uneven and combined development approach, the commercialization model, and world-systems theory and its multiple variants. The point is not to run an exhaustive survey but to briefly identify the stakeholders in the Marxist debate around PA within which Political Marxism is situated. Political Marxists diverge from almost all the positions listed in the second category. Despite significant differences, what binds these positions together at an analytical level is their confluence on the world-historical origins of capitalism. Processes such as colonization, therefore, lie at the heart of capitalism’s birth for these frameworks. It is in this context and in response to world-systems theory, specifically Immanuel Wallerstein’s The Modern World-System, volume 1, that Political Marxism emerged in the late 1970s on the pages of Past & Present and New Left Review, engendering what has come to be known “the Brenner debate.”
To understand why Political Marxists trace the origin of capitalism to the English countryside, independent of colonialism, let us briefly attend to Brenner, Chibber, and Ellen Meiksins Wood. Brenner argues that for capitalism to emerge, there must be a mechanism in place to convert wealth accumulated from colonial plunder into capital, which required the prior existence of specific social property relations, namely those between the owners of the means of production and free wage-laborers. In other words, the origin of capitalism is conditional on the origin of the surplus-extracting system of free wage-labor.10Robert Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism,” New Left Review, 104, no. 7 (1977): 33., https://doi.org/10.64590/9sc. For Brenner, this class system did not emerge automatically but rather due to the class struggle against feudalism, allowing peasants to experience a transition from serfdom to free wage-labor. Once established, the system, by virtue of its very structure of social production relations, enforced labor productivity (and the development of productive forces in general) through innovation—the only condition that could help increase the extraction of surplus labor for capitalists and thereby turn the plundered wealth from outside into the source of economic development. Otherwise, wealth has not been in dearth in precapitalist empires. Thus, a rise in global trade and the surplus transfer from the colony to the metropole could not have determined the origin of capitalism.
But, even granting Chibber’s argument wholly, what about the role of the state in colonial India? According to Chibber, the state played an important part in the origin of agrarian capitalism and its further transition into industrial capitalism in England. This missing link in colonial India raises an important question: What kind of capitalism would emerge in a colonial setting where the state, unlike in England, is neither interested in facilitating the complete transformation of precapitalist modes of production, nor in the creation of a home market based on the production of industrial goods?
In England, it was the agrarian class relations specific to the “landlord—capitalist tenant—wage-laborer” triad that made the development of productive forces or “accumulation via innovation” possible. Landlords’ consolidation of large landholdings made the application of new techniques workable; expropriation of peasants from their land created free tenants and free wage-laborers; tenants were compelled “to innovate to sell their products at the market price” to survive; and landlords too were systematically compelled to invest in farm infrastructure for greater profits. A “symbiotic relationship” emerged between landlords and capitalist tenants that eventually facilitated a decrease in necessary labor time and the increase of surplus labor.11Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalist Development,” 75–76. In the last analysis, Brenner acknowledges that the “world market” did play a significant part, as “the original pressure” on the English clothing industry came from the European demand on landlords and capitalist tenants to seek innovation and improvement. But this became possible only because favorable class relations, away from “serfdom and entrenched peasant property,” were already in place.12Brenner, The Origins of Capitalist Development,” 76–77.
Echoing Brenner, Wood argues in The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View that capitalism emerged when the market started exerting its imperatives of competition, accumulation, profit maximization, and increasing labor productivity and not because of the wealth accumulation resulting from unequal exchange between the core and periphery. But how did the market start imposing its compulsions in a certain spatio-temporal context when it had not done so in the centuries before? Wood argues that a landed elite with weak extraeconomic powers, large landholdings, and a strong, centralized state came together to produce specific social property relations that generated market compulsions.13Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (Verso, 2017), 98–99. A landed elite with weak extraeconomic powers could not coercively squeeze greater rents and were rather incentivized to encourage tenants to increase labor productivity. Tenants were pressured both by landlords and the market to enhance productivity or lose access to land. Land rent dictated by the market (in contrast to fixed rent) was the newly introduced variable compelling tenants to reduce costs and increase productivity in a competitive landscape. As productivity standards were being set by tenants who were under more direct and urgent compulsions of the market, these variable rents even indirectly pushed tenants still holding onto customary tenure to produce competitively. Under such conditions, more productive tenants prospered as others descended to propertyless wage workers.14Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, 99–103. Overall, it was these social property relations and the associated market compulsions (not opportunities, as argued by the likes of Smith) that converted the traditional rentier landholding class into the agrarian bourgeoisie and the dispossessed traditional peasants into either capitalist tenants or wage-laborers.
While both Brenner and Wood converge on the transformation of social property relations and the onslaught of market compulsions as conditions for the origin of capitalism, there are important differences between them. For instance, though not dismissive of Brenner’s triad, Wood emphasizes how the competitive pressures of the market depended on tenant-producers and not the waged working class, as the latter “remained very much a minority in seventeenth-century England.”15Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, 130. Moreover, she usefully highlights things that the Brenner thesis overlooks: the fact that capitalism could not have emerged without the network of international trade; the European state system’s contribution to capitalist development; and how capitalism transformed traditional colonialism into capitalist imperialism.16Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, 63–64.
Though consistent with Brenner and Wood on the question of market dependence and social property relations, Chibber focuses on India as part of his critique of Subaltern Theory in his influential Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, arguing that capitalism has been successful in materializing its universalizing tendency. Chibber critiques postcolonial theory’s romanticization of the local and its “successful” resistance against capital’s incursion in India and other parts of the Global South, demonstrating how capital universalizes market dependence by incorporating difference rather than (as the Subalternists assume) imposing homogeneity. Despite these sound premises, Chibber goes on to deny the specificity of colonial capitalism. For Chibber, capitalism has been equally violent in the metropole throughout its history, never ceasing to deploy personal authority. Moreover, its logic of competition and market imperatives did not experience any change in the colonies.17Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (Verso, 2013), 22–23, 100–23.
On Chibber
Chibber’s denial of the specificity of colonial capitalism raises two immediate objections. First, although Chibber accuses the Subalternists of not acknowledging capital’s capacity to incorporate difference, he himself ironically dilutes the question of difference by denying capitalism’s plurality. Chibber rejects the Subalternist argument that the colonial bourgeoisie abandoned the revolutionary role of transforming feudal relations into capitalist ones by claiming that such transformation in England owed largely to class struggle and state as a facilitator, rather than the bourgeoisie. The Subalternists’ expectations for the Indian bourgeoisie are, therefore, misplaced.
Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancioğlu have effectively countered Chibber’s denial of the role of the English (and French) bourgeoisie in antifeudal revolutions, while also arguing that a similar role becomes less achievable the further we travel “in space and time from capitalism’s inception.”18Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu, “Limits of the Universal: The Promises and Pitfalls of Postcolonial Theory and Its Critique,” Historical Materialism 25, no. 3 (2017): 48, https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206X-12341539. But, even granting Chibber’s argument wholly, what about the role of the state in colonial India? According to Chibber, the state played an important part in the origin of agrarian capitalism and its further transition into industrial capitalism in England. This missing link in colonial India raises an important question: What kind of capitalism would emerge in a colonial setting where the state, unlike in England, is neither interested in facilitating the complete transformation of precapitalist modes of production, nor in the creation of a home market based on the production of industrial goods? The differing priorities of the state in England and India lead to a distinction between “depeasantization, proletarianization and urbanization at home [England], and peasantization, ruralization and the superexploitation of coerced labor in the colonies,” as Farshad Araghi reminds us.19Farshad Araghi, “The Invisible Hand and the Visible Foot: Peasants, Dispossession, and Globalization,” in Peasants and Globalization: Political Economy, Rural Transformation, and the Agrarian Question, ed. A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi and Cristóbal Kay (Routledge, 2009), 122. British India is a classic case of this kind of capitalism involving peasantization, ruralization, export-led commodity production, and superexploitation. It is simply incomprehensible that Chibber would hesitate to distinguish this colonial capitalism from the English case.20To be sure, far from such a distinction being a postcolonial mainstay, Marxists have been at the forefront of theorizing colonial capitalism, although from different vantage points. To mention a few, see Hamza Alavi, “India and the Colonial Mode of Production,” Economic and Political Weekly 10, no. 33/35 (August 1975): 1235–62; Paresh Chattopadhyay, “Mode of Production in Indian Agriculture: An Anti-Kritik,” Economic and Political Weekly 7, no. 53 (1972): 185–92; Steve J. Stern, “Feudalism, Capitalism, and the World-System in the Perspective of Latin America and the Caribbean,” American Historical Review 93, no. 4 (October 1988): 829–72, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/93.4.829; Jairus Banaji, “For a Theory of Colonial Modes of Production,” Economic and Political Weekly 7, no. 52 (December 1972): 2498–502.
Since he rejects the notion of a different trajectory of capitalism in the colony, Chibber inflexibly relies on categories such as free market competition and market dependence that define capitalism theoretically. While these categories are universal in character, there are serious limits to their application “to particular spaces and histories in an unmediated fashion.”
Second, Chibber’s argument that capitalist violence has been prevalent in colonies and the metropole alike throughout capitalism’s history—including in the present—is fundamentally flawed. Chibber argues that capitalism and violence go hand in hand, both in the extraction of absolute surplus value in the colonies and relative surplus value in the metropole: historically, the power relations in the latter “were almost exactly like the coercive relations” in the former.21Chibber maintains that it is misleading to argue that violence is exclusive to the extraction of absolute surplus value operative in the colonies. To the contrary, the extraction of relative surplus value in the metropole also necessitated equally prevalent violence, whose content differed from feudal coercion but not at all from colonial violence. Both in the United Kingdom and the United States, interpersonal domination of owners (and managers) over workers had been not only a recurring feature but also a strategy deployed to increase labor productivity, lasting well into the 1930s. “Capital, in both East and West, has never been content to rely on the ‘dull compulsion of economic relations’ to enforce its diktat.” See Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 111–23. That is, the violence characterizing coerced labor is not qualitatively different from that characterizing free labor. In other words, slavery, debt bondage, and indenture involve the same power relations as wage labor. By equating colonial violence permeating commodity production in British Bengal with the violence of personal authority at manufacturing firms in the metropole England (and then the United States), Chibber commits a historical and theoretical blunder. He mistakes the universality of capitalist violence for its particularity—that is, the abstract, general form of capitalist violence for the concrete, differentiated content of colonial violence, involving, for instance, an extremely exploitative ryoti system in the indigo production in lower Bengal that presupposed intense direct supervision and a mass of unpaid peasant family workers.22Banaji, A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism, 110. An equally brutal story runs through the opium and jute manufacturing circuits of Bengal, alternating between the violence of advance-based and no-advance-based systems.23Banaji, A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism, 107–13. Not that capital has not been violent in the metropole—after all, “blood and dirt” has been common to its origins both in western Europe and the colonies—but to argue that it has been equally violent, irrespective of time and space, is to trivialize the colonial experience. For instance, nowhere in England did capital institute production relations exclusively based on hereditary, racialized categories as was the case in colonial Punjab and Bengal.24See Navyug Gill, Labors of Division: Global Capitalism and the Emergence of the Peasant in Colonial Panjab (Stanford University Press, 2024); Rohan D’Souza, Drowned and Dammed: Colonial Capitalism and Flood Control in Eastern India (Oxford University Press, 2006), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195682175.001.0001.
Chibber’s denial of the difference between capitalism in the colonies and the metropole has deep implications for his denial of colonialism’s role in creating capitalism. Since he rejects the notion of a different trajectory of capitalism in the colony, Chibber inflexibly relies on categories such as free market competition and market dependence that define capitalism theoretically. While these categories are universal in character, there are serious limits to their application “to particular spaces and histories in an unmediated fashion.”25Anievas and Nişancıoğlu, “Limits of the Universal,” Historical Materialism 25, no. 3 (December 2017): 40. In fact, historically, some of these categories unfolded remarkably differently in colonies than in the metropole. For instance, free market competition—a universal category and the central compulsion to the genesis of agrarian capitalism in England—remained missing, or at best distorted, in British Punjab for a very long time. Three decades after the annexation of Punjab in 1849, the colonial state inaugurated a massive canal irrigation project and created nine canal colonies in the hitherto semi-arid, scarcely populated, agropastoral western Punjab as part of a grand agrarian conquest to enfold a novel commodity production frontier. Starting in the 1880s, Millions from eastern and central Punjab were systematically incentivized to colonize and cultivate the “wastelands.” The bulk of these colonists were given sizable pieces of land—about twenty-seven acres each—to produce wheat, cotton, and rice for the world market.26Imran Ali, The Punjab under Imperialism, 1885–1947 (Princeton University Press, 1988), 19. For about three decades, the state played landlord and forced these state-tenants, using both legal and extralegal disciplinary means, to bring about improvement. Unlike early modern England, these tenant-producers only had occupancy and cultivating rights and were under no immediate threat of eviction because of low productivity. Unlike in England, where commodity production took place under the sway of free market competition among tenants, production for market in Punjab occurred under the legal and extraeconomic command of the colonial state, with the virtual absence of market forces compelling tenants to increase productivity to continue to retain the leases. Moreover, unlike the English countryside, tenant-producers were not subject to variable rents dictated by the market but fixed rents predetermined by the state.
These are not minor differences to be brushed aside in favor of the obvious argument that capital’s universalism has the tendency to absorb difference. These are substantive divergences that call for nuanced attention to how capitalist imperialism operated in the colony and shaped (and was shaped by) colonial capitalism. Subalternists are wrong in asserting that capitalism failed in its universalizing mission when it reached the colonial shores, but so is Chibber in contending that the specifics of the colonial experience do not signify a different, non-European trajectory of capitalist modernity. Such an abstract, “static and thoroughly undialectical essentialism,” as the Marxist historian Utathya Chattopadhyaya puts brilliantly, “is resolutely unmarked by geography, history, language, philosophy, and faith,” failing to attend to difference.27Utathya Chattopadhyaya, “Author’s Roundtable: Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital: Response by Utathya Chattopadhyaya,” Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, University of Illinois, June 26, 2014, https://unitforcriticism.wordpress.com/2014/06/26/authors-roundtable-vivek-chibber-postcolonial-theory-and-the-specter-of-capital-response-by-utathya-chattopadhyaya. For more on Chibber’s undialectical approach, see Michael Levien, “Subalternists Scrutinized: Review of Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital by Vivek Chibber,” European Journal of Sociology 54, no. 3 (December 2013): 485–97, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003975613000295; Julian Murphet, “No Alternative,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 1, no. 1 (March 2014): 157–63, https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2013.9. Colonial capitalism, of course, is not a parallel mode of production representing the outside of capital but a concrete and historical situation necessitating specific historical-theoretical reflections for its specific trajectory.
Since Chibber privileges the ubiquity of certain laws of motion of capital that were in greatest display in England over the divergences and mutations these laws experienced in certain spatiotemporal contexts (such as colonial Punjab and Bengal), such an analysis is committed to leave out capitalist colonialism from the story of capitalism’s origins. This is precisely because it defines capitalism in a narrow sense, largely borrowed from the western European experience, depriving it of its tendency to reformulate elements of its laws of motion in accordance with the colonial frontier at hand. In other words, because this analysis defines capitalism inwardly, what happens to capitalism in the colonies is not considered intrinsic to its formation.
In another interview for Jacobin, Chibber makes the case for distinguishing imperialism from capitalism, insisting that the former entails one state exercising direct or indirect control over another, and the latter is about one class exploiting the other irrespective of borders.28Vivek Chibber, “To Fight Imperialism Abroad, Build Class Struggle at Home,” interview by Alexander Brentler, Jacobin, October 16, 2022, https://jacobin.com/2022/10/vivek-chibber-imperialism-lenin-marx-class-struggle-labor-aristocracy. As correct as this distinction may be at a formal level, it completely ignores that imperialism is intrinsic to capitalism, or that capitalist class relations are incapable of acquiring a world-historical character without the powerful states in the core exercising control over “weaker” states in the periphery. States continue to be the primary conduit for the capitalist class to go about the business of exploitation. Instead of separating imperialism from capitalism, we need to come to terms with the expansionary logic intrinsic to capitalism: “The tendency to create the world market,” Marx argues, “is directly given in the concept of capital itself. Every limit appears as a barrier to be overcome.”29Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Penguin Books, 1973), 408. Modern territorial occupation is not separate from capitalism but a political expression reflective “of the underlying drive of market expansion and domination—the result, not the cause, of capitalist imperialism.”30Todd Gordon and Jeffery R. Webber, “Prelude to a New Imperial Order?” Spectre, April 26, 2024, http://doi.org/10.63478/LVR7YPP1I.
States continue to be the primary conduit for the capitalist class to go about the business of exploitation. Instead of separating imperialism from capitalism, we need to come to terms with the expansionary logic.
The distinction between imperialism and capitalism continues to loom large not only over Chibber, but over Political Marxism as a whole. Although some acknowledge how capitalism historically transformed traditional colonialism into capitalist imperialism, the persistence haunting the separation between the two is uncanny. Central to this is the distinction between absolute surplus value extraction and relative surplus value extraction. The distinction is drawn so sharply and decisively that any “mode of surplus extraction that does not conform to the latter market-dependent form, and any social formation characterized by extra-economic forms of surplus extraction, is therefore conceived as noncapitalist.”31Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu, How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism (Pluto Press, 2015), 30, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt183pb6f. See also, Jeff Black’s unpublished “Transition Debates I: Political Marxism and Theoretical History,” as part of a fascinating developing PhD dissertation titled “Centering Capital: Political Marxism and the Value-Form.” “The capitalist mode of production Marx exposits in the three volumes of Capital is here treated as a heuristic model to be applied as a template to determine whether and when a concrete historical society had become capitalist.” Even Wood, who otherwise offers a welcome corrective to this sharp distinction and is open to the contradictory coexistence of the two forms, calls the English East India Company operations and much of the subsequent British state-led workings in India noncapitalist.32Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital (Verso, 2005), 110–17.
Interestingly, while maintaining a distinction between capitalism and imperialism, Chibber is apparently open to viewing noncoercive market compulsions and extraeconomic violence, the latter of which he considers ubiquitous across the metropole-colonial divide, as parts of capitalism. On the one hand, he seems to grasp the twofold development of global capitalism; on the other, he establishes a clean separation between the two folds. Nothing can be more obfuscating and self-defeating than this. In other words, for Chibber to say that the noncoercive and coercive apparatus can hold together is to undermine the very universalizing laws of motions of capitalism on which his thesis is based. After all, for the coercive apparatus to sit next to the noncoercive compulsion is not tantamount to the latter (capitalism) absorbing the former (the difference), but the overall phenomenon impeding universalization. This is precisely because Chibber’s theorization of capitalism’s universalizing tendencies only pays lip service to difference while being absolutely uncompromising on the singular trajectory of capitalist modernity across the North-South divide.
II. The Other Half
Against Reducing the Mode of Production to Labor Form
Political Marxists bring class struggle, social property relations, market dependence, and productivity to the center of the story. For Brenner, the story of origin is best understood in the inner workings of the landlord-capitalist tenant-wage-laborer triad; for Wood, it is more of the same, although the landlord-tenant dynamic is of greater historical significance; and for Chibber, the laws of motion that undergird the genesis process in the English countryside are immutable in their universalization, setting in motion a singular trajectory for the rest of the world. Overall, Political Marxism outlines unique conditions under which capitalism emerged in rural England and then engulfed the world at large.
But is that it? Was the world beyond western Europe engulfed based on the simplistic understanding that locates capitalism’s dynamics solely in its endogenous origins? Although some Political Marxists, as the editors of Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism, make it clear that “once capitalism emerged in England, it never surfaced again in the same way in any other region of the globe,” its laws of motion and the wage-labor form (free or not) continue to appear as the sine qua non in capitalist origins and development for most Political Marxists.33Xavier Lafrance and Charles Post, “Conclusion,” in Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism, ed. Xavier Lafrance and Charles Post (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 344, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95657-2_14. This is tantamount to reducing the mode of production to forms of labor exploitation, which is a mere component of the former. “In Brenner’s schema,” argue Anievas and Nişancıoğlu, “Marx’s master concept, the ‘mode of production’—conceived as the composite totality of relations encapsulating the economic, legal, ideological, cultural and political spheres—is reduced to the much thinner ‘social property relations’ concept, which is itself reduced to a form of exploitation.” Brenner takes “the singular relation of exploitation between lord and peasant as the most fundamental and axiomatic component of the mode of production, which in turn constitutes the foundational ontology and analytical building block upon which ensuing theoretical and historical investigation is constructed.” Besides committing such a reductionism, Brenner and his followers, in other words, also elevate forms of labor exploitation to an “ontological singularity” defining the contours of all investigation into the history of capitalism. The result, per Anievas and Nişancıoğlu, is “a dual tunnelling—both temporal and spatial.… Temporally, the history of capitalism’s origins is reduced to the historical manifestation of one conceptual moment—the freeing of labor—and in turn explained by it. Spatially, the genesis of capitalism is confined to a single geographical region—the English countryside—immune from wider intersocietal developments.”34Anievas and Nişancıoğlu, How the West Came to Rule, 24.
Furthermore, reducing mode of production to labor forms (wage labor in this case) becomes problematic when viewed empirically from the longstanding history of wage labor prior to the early modern England, during which it existed both in the form of formally free wage labor and in multiple disguised forms, as documented extensively by Jairus Banaji.35Banaji, Theory as History, 145. Similarly, not only temporally prior to the English countryside moment, but in terms of production, wage labor perhaps first developed in armies “rather than in the ‘interior of bourgeois society,’” as Marx noted.36Anievas and Nişancıoğlu, How the West Came to Rule, 29. Such reductionism compels history to conform to the abstract conceptualization of capitalism, ignoring how capitalist social relations in practice have always been operating at the crossroads of diverse labor regimes within global and regional contexts.
Historically, Marxists from diverse theoretical convictions (including Luxemburg, Wallerstein, Eric Williams, and C. L. R. James) have emphasized capitalism’s unprecedented flexibility to summon varied modes of non-wage-labor control, sometimes even within a particular national or subnational context.37Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (Oxford, 2003); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century (University of California Press, 2011),
https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520948570; Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (University of North Carolina Press, 1994); C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (Vintage, 1989). Some—such as Williams, James, Dale Tomich, and David McNally—have focused on slavery as integral to the capitalist world economy.38Dale W. Tomich, Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar: Martinique and the World-Economy, 1830–1848, 2nd ed. (SUNY Press, 2016), https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.18473014; David McNally, Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History (University of California Press, 2025), https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520415980. Others, such as Wallerstein, Eric Wolf, T. J. Byres, Silvia Federici, Maria Mies, and Claude Meillassoux, reflect on the deep-seated relationship between capitalism, sharecropping, family labor, social reproduction, and nonmarket social relations in the colonies.39Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (University of California Press, 1982); T. J. Byres, ed., Sharecropping and Sharecroppers (Frank Cass, 1983); Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia, 2004); Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (Zed Books, 1986); Claude Meillassoux, Maidens, Meal and Money: Capitalism and the Domestic Community (Cambridge University Press, 1981). Understandably, these thinkers often have very different analyses of capitalism’s subsumption of various forms of wage and non-wage-labor regimes; however, they all consider capitalist development tied to diverse forms of labor exploitation and not just wage labor.
But how was capital able to subsume these forms? For Wallerstein, subsuming varied labor regimes is intrinsic to capitalism’s origin; this is how the first capitalist world-economy structured itself in the long sixteenth century—wage labor in the core (England, Netherlands, and northern France), slavery and “coerced cash-crop labor” in the periphery (eastern Europe and Latin America), and sharecropping in the semiperiphery (Portugal and Spain). Capitalism has a world-systemic origin, which owes to the subsumption of an extensive, specialized global division of labor based on occupational, geographical, and hierarchical factors.40Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, vol. 1, 349–51. For Tomich, “slavery in the circuit of sugar” plantations of the early- to mid-nineteenth-century Caribbean illustrates capitalism’s organization of varied forms of social labor on a world scale—a process in which states play the key role. Each form of labor relations (such as slave relations in Martinique) constitutes a specific form of commodity production (such as cane sugar). All these labor relations and corresponding forms of commodity production, although not always neatly demarcated, are related to each other “through the world market and world-scale processes of integration and division of social labor.”41Tomich, Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar, 7.
The capitalist world economy’s integration of diverse accumulation processes as part of the expansive PA process connects these diametrically opposed processes.…While the expropriation-based industrialization in England supplied the European and colonial markets with manufactured goods, the attachment- and sedentarization-based monocropping in Punjab became the source of cheap grains and cotton for Britain.
In British Punjab in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, capital subsumed the widest possible array of labor forms—including family labor, debt-tied labor, seasonal wage-labor, and obligatory labor performed by landless kamins (service castes) in exchange of grains for the season—as part of an extremely complex process of capitalist imperialism that not only exploited the preceding classist and casteist faultlines but also reordered and restructured them anew. These labor forms, overwhelmingly nonwage, found their most dominant organization under the sharecropping arrangement. Within this arrangement, especially in the canal colonies of western Punjab, the bulk of the colonists (the state tenants) employed a combination of family labor and the obligatory labor of kamins to work on the maximum possible piece of land, while leasing out the rest to subtenants, who further employed a similar combination. Seasonal wage labor (from the landless classes including those recently turned landless, such as the agropastoral nomads) and subsistence farming, among other forms, were also part of the mix. But the form that contributed the most to the production of monocrops for the world market was what Henry Bernstein calls “peasant petty commodity production”—that is, family labor (and kamins labor). And how exactly were these non-wage-labor, quasi-wage-labor, and seasonal wage-labor forms brought together in colonial Punjab? In the more fertile and more densely populated eastern and central Punjab, instead of expropriating and proletarianizing the peasant as was the case in England, the colonial state constructed a hereditary peasant class by cultivating various attachments to caste identity, caste-based labor activity, community honor, and land ownership—a phenomenon that Navyug Gill has called “accumulation by attachment.”42Gill, Labors of Division, 8, 19, 65. In the semi-arid western Punjab too—toward which millions from eastern and central Punjab were enticed to migrate, occupy, clear, and cultivate the newly leased “wastelands”—the accumulation by attachment thesis holds by large measure. But, here, those indigenous to these semi-arid terrains—the agropastoral nomads—were systematically forced to subdue their use of common land and the mode of subsistence based on livestock rearing, grazing, and rain-fed seasonal agriculture to private-property-based, settled monocrop agriculture. Despite persistent resistance against the state’s exorbitant grazing tax and settled farming, the indigenous nomads eventually had to sedentarize under the might of the coercive state, the complicity of clan chiefs, and the existentialist threat posed to them. I call this process “accumulation by sedentarization,” again, a polar opposite of the English-style separation of producers from means of production.43Bilal Zahoor, “British Punjab and the Dialectics of Primitive Accumulation,” International Review of Social History 70 (2025): 355, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859025100588.
The capitalist world economy’s integration of diverse accumulation processes as part of the expansive PA process connects these diametrically opposed processes—that is, attachment and sedentarization in colonial Punjab and expropriation in metropole England. While the expropriation-based industrialization in England supplied the European and colonial markets with manufactured goods, the attachment- and sedentarization-based monocropping in Punjab became the source of cheap grains and cotton for Britain. The steamships, the opening of Suez Canal in 1870, and railroads had already integrated India into the world market well before the canal colonies project in western Punjab.44For instance, India was the second largest exporter of wheat after the United States to the United Kingdom between 1881 and 1887, even though the gap of the volume of exports between the United States and India was significant. See William Bear, “The Indian Wheat Trade,” Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, 24 (1888): 53. The greatest momentum to the trend, however, came with canal colonies and the accompanying expansion of large-scale infrastructure, turning the minor port city of Karachi into the largest wheat-handling port of all the British colonial ports by 1910.45See Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, “Wheat City: Karachi in the Commodity Revolution, 1880s–1920s”, https://mellonurbanism.harvard.edu/wheat-city-karachi-commodity-revolution-1880s-1920s. But, still, Indian contribution to the Britain-led global grains market must not be assessed exclusively in terms of the India-Britain bilateral trade. Instead, a more plausible approach would view that the surplus in the Indian balance of payments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries “became the pivot of the enlarged reproduction of Britain’s world-scale processes of capital accumulation and of the City’s [London’s] mastery of world finance.”46Cited in Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 271. Kasim Tirmizey offers a complementary perspective on the “triangular pattern of trade” between Britain, India, and the United States, arguing that the revenue generated from India allowed Britain to not only pay for the Indian exports to the metropole but also balance its trade deficit with the United States (and continental Europe) and export capital to the latter.47Kasim Ali Tirmizey, “The Geometry of (Anti)imperialism in Food Regime Analysis,” Environment and Planning A 56, no. 3 (May 2024): 852, 855–56, 861, https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X231214419. Punjab was central to both these multilateral trade patterns and the world-scale diverse processes of accumulation, especially around cash crops like wheat, cotton, and rice. Wheat, for instance, offers an interesting nodal point bringing together diverse labor forms (nonwage labor in wheat production in Punjab and free wage labor in industrial bread production in England) and diverse accumulation processes (attachment and sedentarization in Punjab and expropriation in England) at the world market.
If capitalism and nonwage-labor modes had been historically prevalent, the wage-labor-only and precolonial origin story of capitalism stands weak. As does its implicit claim to a particular insight into the ontology of capitalism. Instead, the breadth of historical capitalist experiences and the complexity of the depth within each make a case for capitalist colonialisms being much more revelatory about this mode of production, the repository of relations of production, and modes of labor exploitation it deploys than the historically peripheral free-wage-labor-based capitalist germination in western Europe—at least during the epoch characterizing PA. The western European model, as capitalism’s actually existing career reveals, is the exception, not the norm.
Against Contracting PA to Its Internal Dimension
The English countryside genesis story not only tells half the story, but also confuses parts with the whole, namely the internal (English countryside) component of PA with its totality. I view the gradual process of PA as a dialectical unity of internal and external components—that is, the processes in western Europe and the colonies respectively. In other words, what happened inside the English countryside (and then Europe at large) is historically and analytically tied to what occurred outside this region as part of the process of PA as a historical whole. Marx’s acknowledgement of colonial plunder being integral to PA was neither a “rhetorical ploy” he used against Smith’s frugality-induced-PA argument, nor a mere “sidenote” that anticolonial nationalists blew out of proportion and got the whole story wrong, as Chibber maintains.
Political Marxists, again, continue to conflate a part (the internal component of PA) with the whole of PA. In their account, the part (the English countryside) appears as a coherent whole, capable of singularly exemplifying the transformation of an entire mode of production into another without requiring either the preceding material conditions developed over time within a regional and global context or the then-ongoing and subsequent system of world economy dominated heavily by colonial relations.48Political Marxist analysis leaves out a range of non-European technological and cultural developments that Europe appropriated as part of capitalist formation. See Anievas and Nişancıoğlu, How the West Came to Rule, 25. Chibber particularly suffers from such internalism—most likely springing from classical sociology’s foundational assumption that societies develop on the back of “internal structures and agents”—ignoring how colonial relations shaped capitalism’s longue durée origins.49Alexander Anievas and Kamran Matin, “Introduction: Historical Sociology, World History and the ‘Problematic of the International,’” in Historical Sociology and World History: Uneven and Combined Development over the Longue Durée, ed. Alexander Anievas and Kamran Matin (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016), 5, https://doi.org/10.5040/9798881812768. His analysis, for instance, does not acknowledge the significance of knowledge transfer—for example, of the late-eighteenth-century Mysore’s rocket technology to British India—in the formation and development of capitalism.50Luke Cooper, “Asian Sources of British Imperial Power: The Role of the Mysorean Rocket in the Opium War,” in Historical Sociology and World History, 113–14, https://doi.org/10.5040/9798881812768.ch-7. In such an account, the world market, as Tomich reminds us, “remains external to the inner structure of national economies.… Analytical priority is given to the ‘internal’ relations of production, while the market, exchange, and merchant capital are typically regarded as external to production relations and are held to be of secondary importance.” The result is a “dualistic conception” of the history of capitalism that continually juxtaposes the internal against the external, production against exchange (or market) to the point that “the world historical origins of capital,” to which colonialism was central, stand eliminated.51Dale Tomich, “Capitalism in Slavery, Slavery in Capitalism: Original Accumulation, Slave Rent, and the Formation of the World Market,” 526–27.
…equating a hyperlocal part of the beginnings with the whole of the beginning and extrapolating the logic of that hyperlocal part globally has the disadvantage of imposing Marx’s “historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism” into “a historico-philosophical theory of the general course,” against which he himself warned toward the end of his life.
It should not be surprising that not only world-systems and dependency theorists but Marxists from diverse convictions—materialist feminism, racial capitalism, autonomist Marxism, ecological Marxism, and uneven and combined development—think of colonialism as constitutive of the origin of capitalism. Arrighi, for instance, laments that in Brenner’s Marxian reading “there is no room for Marx’s more world-systemic theorizations, most notably the thesis that the formation of a Eurocentric world market in the sixteenth century was the single most important condition for the emergence of capitalist production in western Europe.”52Arrighi, “Capitalism and the Modern World-System,” 120. Then there’s a panoply of “food regimes analysis” thinkers, demonstrating how precolonial economic, social and ecological structures were reordered and transformed to sustain the western Europe-centric food imperialism during the colonial (and postcolonial) period. Although Harriet Friedmann and Philip McMichael are the pioneers of such analysis, their work largely focuses on postwar agriculture. Subsequent food regimes analysts, such as Farshad Araghi and Kasim Ali Tirmizey, offer a new periodization of world food regimes and expand the geographical scope beyond North America. See Harriet Friedmann and Philip McMichael, “Agriculture and the State System: The Rise and Decline of National Agricultures, 1870 to the Present,” Sociologia Ruralis 29, no. 2 (1989): 93–117; Farshad Araghi, “The Invisible Hand and the Visible Foot,” 111–47; Kasim Ali Tirmizey, “The Geometry of (Anti)imperialism in Food Regime Analysis.”
Marx, too, understood colonialism’s and world trade’s indispensability to capitalism. In addition to chapter 31 of Capital, volume 1, to which Chibber refers skeptically, Marx went beyond the “rhetoric” of the “discovery of gold and silver in America” in both his pre-Capital and post-Capital writings. In The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), Marx alluded to slavery in the cotton belts of the Americas as central to the emergence of “world trade” and “large-scale industry.”53Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (Progress Publishers, 1955), 49. In many of his journalistic writings and notebooks on India, Marx acknowledged the East India Company’s destructive and transformative role in shaping the region and British industrial capitalism. Moreover, late Marx’s study of ecology and colonial societies is increasingly attentive to how nature in general and its geographical components in the colonies formed the basis of capitalism. The point is, as I have argued elsewhere in the context of PA in colonial Punjab, that the internal (England) and external (colonies) dimensions of PA should be considered as part of a historical whole encompassing diverse accumulation processes.54Zahoor, “British Punjab and the Dialectics of Primitive Accumulation,” 342, 354.
Moreover, a hyperlocal story of origin that experiences the closure of the logic of capitalism and its laws of motion based on one experience remains blinded to capitalism’s trajectory beyond rural England. Political Marxists, of course, acknowledge how capitalism came to subsequently dominate Europe and the rest of the world by transforming traditional colonialism into capitalist imperialism. But equating a hyperlocal part of the beginnings with the whole of the beginning and extrapolating the logic of that hyperlocal part globally has the disadvantage of imposing Marx’s “historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism” into “a historico-philosophical theory of the general course,” against which he himself warned toward the end of his life.55Karl Marx, “Marx–Zasulich Correspondence: Letters and Drafts”, in Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and “the Peripheries of Capitalism,” ed. Teodor Shanin (Monthly Review Press, 1983), 136. In fact, the recent wave of scholarship around late Marx—owing largely to the ongoing publication of second Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA²)—has animated the PA debate again. Unlike Chibber, this body of work strongly converges against reading the periphery through western Europe and in favor of a multilinear trajectory.56For earlier contributions to the debate, see Lawrence Krader, ed., The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx (Van Gorcum, 1972); Teodor Shanin, ed., Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and “the Peripheries of Capitalism” (Monthly Review Press, 1983). For recent relevant contributions, see Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (University of Chicago Press, 2010), https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226019840.001.0001; Kevin B. Anderson, The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads: Colonialism, Gender, and Indigenous Communism (Verso Books, 2025); Ryan Breeden, “After the Last Word: Review of Kevin B. Anderson’s The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads,” Spectre, December 3, 2025, http://doi.org/10.63478/TPSYWEDW.
The hyperlocal story also has the disadvantage of truncating the timeline of PA and not viewing colonialism as constitutive of capitalism’s longue durée origin. Except for Wood and a few others, the Political Marxism that emerges from such an analysis of the origin, remains oblivious to the seeds of imperialism intrinsic to capitalism—seeds that germinated not post-PA but very much within capitalism’s longue durée origins. This holds especially true for Chibber who not only contracts the expansive origins process to early modern English countryside but also reduces capitalist imperialism to an after-event. Here, the timeline question is important. Following Henry Bernstein, the process of PA must be understood within a timeline that lasted by the end of the colonial period in Asia and Africa, not by the end of the emergence of agrarian relations of production in early modern England.57Henry Bernstein, “Where Is Population in ‘Surplus Population?’” Focaal, 97 (2023): 79–88, 85, https://doi.org/10.3167/fcl.2023.970107. Such a view of the timeline of PA is also somewhat supported by Christopher Alan Bayly’s reference to North Indian society as precapitalist, at least until 1925. See Christopher Alan Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion 1770–1870 (Oxford, 2012), 262. Capitalism, as Political Marxists argue, was a qualitative break from previous modes of production, but the break crystallized gradually and globally—from the early modern period to the middle of the twentieth century, from western Europe to colonies everywhere. All the colonial processes that took place within this timeline were essentially intrinsic to the western Europe-led PA.
Conclusion
Political Marxists are right that we ought to trace the origin of capitalism in expropriation-driven class relations and understand this mode of production as a qualitative rupture, as opposed to a quantitative increase, from previous modes. However, accentuating part of the beginning (English countryside relations of capital) at the cost of the whole of the origin (worldwide development of diverse relations of capital and the capitalist mode of production itself) is simply exonerating capitalism of its brutal colonial past. No one does it more outlandishly than Chibber, who excludes colonialism from the genesis saga; separates capitalism from imperialism; theorizes the European trajectory of PA as a singular, universal trajectory; and fails to distinguish different capitalist power relations across different spatiotemporal contexts. Instead of committing to such historical and theoretical reductionisms, PA should better be understood as a gradual and global process involving a complex, dialectical unity between the internal (expropriation in western Europe) and external (multiple mechanisms in colonies, including at times the total opposite of expropriation—that is, sedentarization) components. That unified but differentiated process lasted by the end of the colonial period. Anyone, Chibber or others, who takes out part of this unity and portrays it as a whole is only telling half the tale.