Reformatting Agrarian Life

William J. Glover is Professor of History at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Making Lahore Modern: Constructing and Imagining a Colonial City (2008).

"A deeply researched, innovative book. No other work since Raymond Williams's The Country and the City and William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis has accomplished what Glover has done here. By making a fresh contribution to explicating the changing dynamics of the city-country relation under modernity, it will jump-start debates about what indeed constitutes a 'village' and what is a 'city.'" -Swati Chattopadhyay, University of California, Santa Barbara "Impeccably researched, elegantly structured, and a pleasure to read. This book blazes a trail through urban and agrarian studies, fundamentally rethinking both. Glover's bold assertion is that the making of an agrarian countryside was modeled on urban principles of spatial and social order. The beauty and strength of the book lies in how lucidly and carefully it marshals the evidence in its support." -Amita Baviskar, Ashoka University "Offering a unique aesthetics of relationality, the distinctiveness of the urban and the agrarian are blurred, disrupted, and retained through wavy lines of mutual implication ordered spatially by regulatory apparatuses that facilitate the articulation of distinct modes of life. In a 'stealth urban history from the countryside', focusing on genealogies of agricultural knowledge production and governance, and village development, Glover brilliantly thickens relations among land, labor, and rule, as the agrarian traverses a heterogeneity of spaces." -AbdouMaliq Simone, University of Sheffield