The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 55, 3 (2018): 345–387 SAGE Los Angeles/London/New Delhi/Singapore/Washington DC/Melbourne DOI: 10.1177/0019464618778406 The sovereignty of political economy: The Garos in a pre-conquest and early conquest era Sanghamitra Misra Delhi University The article is an inquiry into the elision of an image—that of the cotton-producing Garo—in the colonial archive. It situates this inquiry within the pre- and early colonial era where it is still possible to uncover elements of the irrefutable sovereign presence of Garos in eastern India as well as of the regional economic and political system through which the Garo social being makes itself historically visible. Parsing together a narrative of the Garo political order in this period, the article will discuss the ways in which the sovereignty of a people was pivoted around the pro- duction and trade in cotton. Rescuing the image of the cotton-producing Garo from the colonial archive is also a retracing of the seamless becoming of the Garo peasant, as adept at working with the hoe as with the plough, into a cotton trader who embarked on long journeys on foot and on boats every cotton season to the lowlands. The article will also probe into the germaneness of the concept of the ‘hill/forest tribe’ with the sedentary plainsman as its oppositional image and the embedding of ethnicity in circumscribed ‘natural’ habitats in eastern India by the colonial state. Keywords: Garo, cotton, trade, tribe, northeastern India, sovereignty, political economy, political ecology, East India Company, conquest The Garos appear in British records in 1788, 1 just two decades after the East India Company wrested for themselves the Diwani rights in Bengal in 1764—the right to 1 In the letters and reports of John Eliot, an offcer of the East India Company who travelled in the hills to enquire into possible sources of revenue from trade and land between 1788 and 1789. Eliot, who accessed the Garo Hills from the Bengal side of the hills, that is, Mymensingh and Sherpur, wrote the earliest recorded British offcial account of the Garos. See Bengal Government Papers, Assam State Archives, Guwahati, 1788 and Bengal Revenue Consultations 1789–90, Asia, Pacifc and Africa Collections, British Library, London (henceforth BGP/ASA and BRC/APAC). Acknowledgements: This essay is for Peter Robb, my teacher and friend, for whose Festschrift I was unfortunately not able to contribute. A fellowship at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library made possible much of the research. I thank the editors of IESHR and the anonymous referee for their comments on earlier drafts of the article. For his thoughts on my work, I thank Rahul Govind.