Recent literature has suggested that famines are complex, drawn out, and political processes, rather than sudden, natural phenomena. This book is among the first to examine such a process in detail, by studying poor peasants in Ahmednagar district, Western India, between 1870 and 1884. It does so by investigating their factors of production-land, capital and labor-as well as markets in credit and the cheap foodgrains they produced and, above all, their relationship with the colonial state.