1. H. Beveridge, The District of Bakarganj: Its History and Statistics (London: Trubner, 1876), 223. [BACK]

2. See Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974). [BACK]

3. See Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (Paris: A. Colin, 1949). Translated by Sian Reynolds as The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (New York: Harper & Row, 1972). [BACK]

4. Saiyid Sultan, Nabī-Baṃśa, 1: 88, 98, 103. [BACK]

5. Ibid., 107–9. To Adam’s wife Eve, meanwhile, Gabriel gave fire, with which she mastered the art of cooking. Boiling some milk, Eve made sandeś—a famous Bengali sweet that, the poet observes, has no equal. Ibid., 110. [BACK]

6. John P. Thorp, “Masters of Earth: Conceptions of ‘Power’ among Muslims of Rural Bangladesh” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1978), 40–54. Although Adam’s career as a tiller of the soil is also found in the Book of Genesis (3:23), such an association is not made in the Qur’an. In the Muslim world, the perception of Adam as the first cultivator, and of his taking up cultivation at the command of God, may be a uniquely Bengali variant. On the other hand, the notion that God fashioned Adam from clay is common to both Genesis (2:7) and the Qur’an (15:26). [BACK]

8. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, British imperialists and both Hindu and Muslim reformers stressed Islam’s “foreignness,” each for their own reasons. But this should not blind us to the situation before the advent of British colonial rule. [BACK]

9. Webster, Eastern Bengal and Assam District Gazetteers: Noakhali, 39. [BACK]

10. Dhaka District Collectorate Record Room, “Mauza Notes,” Rupganj Thana, Mauza Agla, No. 1063. [BACK]

11. O’Malley, Eastern Bengal District Gazetteers, Khulna, 65. [BACK]

12. As a 1901 survey of Muslims of Nadia District reported, the ashrāf “will not adopt cultivation for their living. They consider cultivation to be a degraded occupation and they shun it for that reason.” Risley Collection, “Reports on the Religious and Social Divisions,” 88. [BACK]

13. See Rafiuddin Ahmed, Bengal Muslims. [BACK]

14. A good summary of the historiography of Mughal decline, and a fresh view of it from the perspective of two provinces, Punjab and Awadh, is found in Muzaffar Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab, 1707–48 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986). [BACK]

15. The decline of central power is usually dated from the death of Aurangzeb (1707), although it was after the death of Shah ‘Alam (1712) that the disintegration of central power is most dramatically seen, as in palace revolutions and in the emergence of independent provincial dynasties in places like Hyderabad and Lucknow. Bengal’s own de facto independence from centralized Mughal authority dated from the governorship of Murshid Quli Khan (1713–27). See Jadunath Sarkar, ed., History of Bengal, 405–13. [BACK]

16. See Alam, Crisis of Empire. [BACK]

17. See Wink, Land and Sovereignty in India. [BACK]

18. William Wilson Hunter, The Indian Musalmans: Are They Bound in Conscience to Rebel against the Queen? (London: Trubner, 1871). [BACK]

19. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, ḥājīs backed with tax-free, state-supported land grants pioneered new rice-cultivating agrarian communities in formerly forested regions of the sultanate of Banten, on the western tip of Java. Sartono Kartodirdjo, The Peasants’ Revolt of Banten in 1888: Its Conditions, Course and Sequel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), 34–61. [BACK]

20. A dramatic example of this is seen in the activities of Wilfred Boniface, an eighth-century saint who preached in the forests of what is now Germany. In the presence of a great crowd of pagans, Boniface personally chopped down a sacred and exceptionally large oak tree known to the German peoples as the “Oak of Jupiter.” On witnessing this, the crowd formally accepted the Christian cult, while Boniface built an oratory from the felled timber and dedicated it to St. Peter. Wilhelm Levison, England and the Continent in the Eighth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), 45–46. [BACK]

21. Richard Koebner, “The Settlement and Colonization of Europe,” in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 1, The Agrarian Life of the Middle Ages, ed. M. M. Postan, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 45. A description of twelfth-century Cistercian activities in northern Germany runs as follows: “The abbot was with the workers when they started to fell the trees for making the arable. In one hand he had a wooden cross, in the other a vessel of holy water. When he arrived in the center of the woods, he planted the cross in the earth, took possession of this untouched piece of earth in the name of Jesus Christ, sprinkled holy water around the area, and finally grasped an axe to cut away some shrubs. The small clearing made by the abbot was the starting point for the monks’ work. One work group (incisores) cut down the trees, a second (exstirpatores) took out the trunks, a third (incensores) burnt up the roots, boughs, and the undergrowth.” Cited in Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), 309. Glacken writes of the “exaltation in changing nature” found throughout the Middle Ages, citing a phrase repeatedly encountered in Carolingian texts, “horridae quondam solitudines ferarum, nunc amoenissima diversoria hominum”—that is, what formerly were frightful wastelands suited only for beasts have now become most pleasant abodes for man. Ibid., 312. [BACK]

22. See Judith Herrin, The Formation of Christendom (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), esp. pt. 1, 19–127; Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (New York: Knopf, 1987). [BACK]

23. The proverb’s Persian form is: Ghalla gar arzān shavad, imsāl Saiyid mīshavam. Census of India, 1931, 5, pt. 1, “Bengal and Sikkim” (Calcutta, 1933), 422 [BACK]