From Freehold to Social Function : revisiting Bromleys Rousseaus Revenge in the Indian Context

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 layered 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 progression of land regimes from common tenure to private ownership. The paper offers a conceptual provocation for a more pluralist understanding of property, governance, and legitimacy beyond Euro-American frameworks. [Publisher's text]