(Im)mobilizing land: Real property and Capitalism's spatial processes in twentieth-century Calcutta and Bombay

Land in capitalism is notoriously difficult to analyse. Treating it as real or fictitious capital/commodity can lead to a neglect of land's theoretical and economic significance, while treating it as distinct from capital/commodity can disproportionately limit focus to cases where land resists financialization/commodification. How, then, can we make sense of land's material placeness alongside the structural requirement to circulate it for accumulation in capitalism? This article argues that a productive way to wrestle with the challenge posed by land in capitalism is to use the analytic of ‘land mobilization.’ This can not only help us account for the difficulty and incompleteness of land's transformation into an asset, but it can also help to include factors such as differences in levels of financialization and strategic reasons for holding real-property that are often left out of scholarly analyses in the making of real estate markets and the historical geographies of capitalism. To demonstrate the fecundity of this approach, this article examines and compares how business and landed elites in late colonial and early postcolonial Calcutta and Bombay understood the real property market, acted on it, and its consequences. Through this comparison, this article suggests that localized struggles to (im)mobilize land have been central in the making of capitalism's historical geographies.