This chapter focuses on the expanding market forces which, through dynamics of their own surely and steadily, engulfed rural Bengal and redirected the thrust of its people's productive activities. It also discusses the imperatives of states and political cultures which, behind the facade of a rhetoric of free trade from the early nineteenth century onwards, sought to impose and extend sets of monopolies. Ever since the 1820s colonial and post-colonial states as much as peasants and agricultural labourers have been susceptible to the rhythms and fluctuations of wider economic trends. Two types of agricultural commercialization have been most pervasive in moulding the productive activities of the working peasantry of eastern India. These were dependent commercialization of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, during which indigo was the leading commodity, and subsistence commercialization of the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, during which jute was the leading commodity.