This book questions the accepted wisdom regarding the relative bargaining powers of landlords and tenants. With the help of unpublished data from the 1850s onwards, Atchi Reddy shows how tenancy has helped in a slow but smooth transfer of land from absentee landlords to tenants and other cultivators, often giving them an upper hand.

Using more than 5000 written tenancy agreements from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, he constructs time-series data for annual, quinquennial and decennial rates of rent. These data are used to analyse trends in rental rates, the socio-economic status of landlords and tenants, the forms of agreements, and the policing arrangements.

The increasing rates of rent are explained in terms of increasing man-land ratios, land productivity and prices, and decreasing rates of land revenue and active land markets.