Tenancy persisted in Indian villages for mutually-beneficial interdependence reasons, not exploitative dependence.

Evidence

On the face of it, Bhaduri’s description appeared still to hold. Tenancy persisted. Bliss and Stern discovered that because a public source of reliable and relatively cheap credit had emerged, and the landowners’ private lending correspondingly had declined, and because it had become possible to market whatever was produced at a reasonable and relatively reliable price outside the village; also because the risks of cultivation remained high for ecological reasons, because the landlords preferred to lease land out-to tenants rather than cultivate it themselves, and because active cultivators preferred to be tenants rather than labourers; so it had indeed come to be in the interests of both landlords and tenants to continue tenancy. But the reasons were not Bhaduri’s. Production was maximized and risk minimized; there was interdependence, not dependence, and accordingly no monopoly of power. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1609

Categorization

• XREF: This mirrors the Milgrom-Champagne-Fairs analysis in the reader’s law-merchant material: institutions that restore information (public credit, reliable markets) convert exploitative dependence into mutually-beneficial interdependence.