From Freehold to Social Function: Revisiting Bromley’s Rousseau’s Revenge in the Indian Context

Journal title HISTORY OF ECONOMIC THOUGHT AND POLICY
Author/s Sattwick Dey Biswas
Publishing Year 2026 Issue 2026/1
Language English Pages 33 P. 5-27 File size 290 KB
DOI 10.3280/SPE2026-001001
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This paper revisits Daniel W. Bromley’s claims about Rousseau’s Revenge through the longue durée of India’s land regimes to rethink the place of property in the history of economic thought. Bromley’s provocation, developed largely within an Anglo-Ameri-can property rights trajectory, frames the contemporary weakening of the freehold estate as a rediscovery of land’s social function. Considering this provocation, the Indian case reveals a historically distinct, but not exceptional, configuration in which land was rarely organised as absolute exclusionary private property, but instead governed through lay-ered institutions and social arrangements of caste, community, religious authority, colo-nial law, and postcolonial state building. Drawing on South Asian historiography and historical institutionalism, the paper treats the social function of land as an analytical category in which obligation, use, and public purpose coexist alongside title. In doing so, it challenges apparent universalist narratives of property that assume a unilinear progres-sion of land regimes from common tenure to private ownership. The paper offers a con-ceptual provocation for a more pluralist understanding of property, governance, and le-gitimacy beyond Euro-American frameworks.

Keywords: social function of property, land and property regimes, history of eco-nomic thought, Rousseau’s Revenge, property and political economy

Jel codes: B11, B31, B52

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Sattwick Dey Biswas, From Freehold to Social Function: Revisiting Bromley’s Rousseau’s Revenge in the Indian Context in "HISTORY OF ECONOMIC THOUGHT AND POLICY" 1/2026, pp 5-27, DOI: 10.3280/SPE2026-001001