This concluding chapter considers the reforms of Governor-general Charles, Lord Cornwallis (1786-93) as the culmination of a decades-long process of imperial co-option, whereby British authorities had gradually expropriated and recast a late Mughal, Persianate system of taxation and justice. Cornwallis’s famous minute on civil justice from 1793 proclaimed itself as a great leap forward in its assertion of ‘British’ justice, making all civil disputes over land and taxation cognizable in separate law courts. Yet Cornwallis, like earlier British reformers, while he railed against the supposedly despotic practices of earlier Indian rulers, was also intensely aware of the multitudes of Indian petitioners and agents (wakils) crowding the Company’s ‘adalats and making legal claims on the Company. His minute on civil justice therefore did not simply announce the arrival of a new rule of law, but envisioned it as a crucial engine of colonial pedagogy, which would eventually turn clamorous and unruly Indian litigants into law-abiding subjects.

In early colonial Bengal, pervasive disputes between urban creditors and tax-paying landlords (zamindars) shaped the East India Company's emergent system of civil justice. Mediating conflicts between creditors and landed debtors was already an important aspect of rulership under the nawabs of Bengal. The Company’s efforts at fiscal centralization, raising tax demands on landholders, and auctioning off ‘revenue farms’ – rights to collect local revenues in return for payments agreed in advance – to wealthy merchants (banians), further intensified conflicts in the countryside. By exploring the controversial efforts of banians to accumulate land rights, and by tracing the Company's hesitant efforts to adjudicate disputes over land and credit, this chapter further reveals how the Company's strategies of legal and fiscal centralization depended on the adaptation and reworking late Mughal, Persianate practices of claimsmaking and dispute resolution. It shows how the Company's efforts to consolidate zamindari rights as a saleable, mortgageable form of taxable private property were being worked out as much in judicial inquiries and decrees as in central legislation.

Chapter seven examines the impact of liberalization on the Egyptian countryside. Touted as a solution to Egypt’s agricultural productivity problems, the liberalization of agriculture resulted in an extended process of dispossession in the countryside and a redistribution of land to the elite and to multi-national investors. The abolition of tenure security for peasants and small farmers, forced evictions and skyrocketing rents brought immiseration to the small producers of rural Egypt and further increased Egypt’s deep dependence on food imports. Dispossession also resulted in the intensification of land-related violence, particularly after the introduction of the agrarian reforms of 1997. While the intensification of class conflict in the countryside did not have the same dramatic effect on Egyptian politics as did the growing strike waves in the industrial cities, it did contribute to the breakdown of traditional relations of authority and the erosion of rural support for the Mubarak regime.