During the 19 century, Bengal underwent a re-ruralisation, what historian Amaury de Riencourt called ‘an agrarian revolution in reverse’, as traditional tax-collectors were turned by the British into landlords, who soon controlled much of the land occupied by peasant farmers. The population of Dacca fell in the two decades from 1814 to 1835 from 150,00 to about 20,000. This process, impoverishment and reversal of an ancient culture, occurred simultaneously with the upheavals in Britain associated with industrialisation. While the people of Britain were increasingly being evicted from the countryside, by ‘improved’ agricultural practices, by enclosures and by the loss of common land and the diversion of land to other – often ornamental – purposes, the people of Bengal, dispossessed of their seasonal earnings as weavers, were undergoing a migration in the opposite direction, forced back upon agriculture alone for their subsistence.