Epistemologies of Property

How is property imagined, transacted, and contested? Epistemologies of Property advances a new account of urban property formation and land markets in early colonial Bombay. In the aftermath of the devastating fire of 1803, the East India Company sought to acquire land on a significant scale, with a view to relocating existing residents. Yet this project required first establishing who held rights to particular plots and distinguishing public from private property---tasks that proved far more complex than Company officials anticipated. To legitimize their claims, Company administrators produced historical narratives---chronicles of property---that traced ownership to foundational treaties, charters, and moments of supposed originary transfer. However, local residents actively contested these efforts. They generated counter-chronicles that mobilized alternative temporalities and principles: familial descent, the moral logic of labor and reward, long-standing occupancy, and precolonial entitlements. These accounts were not merely rhetorical; they relied on distinct evidentiary standards and modes of reasoning, constituting what this book terms competing epistemologies of property. Drawing on archival materials not previously analyzed, Sukriti Issar challenges the dominant historiographical emphasis on the late nineteenth century and on discursive representations alone. Instead, this book argues that urban property---in the sense of alienable real estate---emerged through everyday economic practices and administrative irregularities: through non-enforcement of regulations, through exceptions and waivers, and through repeated transactions in which land was treated as if it were private property. By situating these practices at the turn of the nineteenth century, Epistemologies of Property pushes back the established timeline for the consolidation of modern private property and real estate markets in urban South Asia.