Modeling Spatial Structure of Administrative System in Ponneri , India , in the Late Eighteenth

Until the middle eighteenth century, South India had been under the rule of the Mughal Empire. There were administrative units called magans which are almost equivalent to counties of today. In the late eighteenth century, the colonial policy was introduced by the British and the Mughal Empire had gradually lost its power in South India. To govern the area and collect taxes, the British appointed officers called zamindaris and sent them to some of the villages. Each zamindari governed twenty-five villages on average, which formed a new administrative system. We call the system the zamindari system. The spatial structure of zamindari system does not completely agree with that of the magan system, as we will see later in Section 5. They are partly similar but different in some places. Why is the zamindari system spatially different from the magan system, though they are both administrative systems of the same area? This paper aims to answer this question by modeling the zamindari system by various factors including the magan system. The data sources used in the analysis are the village accounts compiled by Thomas There were 144 villages recorded in the Barnard Report , whose location was digitized into GIS by ArcInfo ver. 7.2.1 (Figure 1). The location of villages was estimated by comparing the census map in 1971 and the Barnard Report, because village names had often changed during the two hundred years. A huge amount of data are available about villages which include socioeconomic data such as population, caste composition, names of landholders, agricultural products, and so forth. 3. Review of existing methods The zamindari system is regarded as a spatial tessellation, that is, a set of non-overlapping space-filling regions (Okabe et al., 2000). Many of the variables that seem influential on the introduction and establishment of the zamindari system, which include the magan system, also