My first book is Labors of Division: Global Capitalism and the Emergence of the Peasant in Colonial Panjab (Stanford University Press, 2024). A South Asia edition was published by Navayana in 2025. Here you can read the Introduction and Table of Contents, and this is a recent seminar presentation given at IIT-Bombay. Below is a short description of the book. Use the code "GILL20" for a twenty percent discount on the Stanford website.

One of the most durable figures in modern history, the peasant has long been a site of intense intellectual and political debate. Yet underlying much of this literature is the assumption that peasants simply existed everywhere, a general if not generic group, traced backward from modernity to antiquity. Focused on the transformation of Panjab during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this book accounts for the colonial origins of global capitalism through a radical history of the concept of "the peasant," demonstrating how seemingly fixed hierarchies were in fact produced, legitimized, and challenged within the preeminent agricultural region of South Asia. Navyug Gill uncovers how and why British officials and ascendant Panjabis disrupted existing forms of identity and occupation to generate a new agrarian order in the countryside. The notion of the hereditary caste peasant engaged in timeless cultivation thus emerged, paradoxically, as a result of a dramatic series of conceptual, juridical, and monetary divisions.

Far from archaic relics, this book ultimately reveals both the landowning peasant and landless laborer to be novel political subjects forged through the encounter between colonialism and struggles over culture and capital within Panjabi society. Questions of progress, exploitation and knowledge come to animate the vernacular operations of power. With this history, Gill brings difference and contingency to understandings of the global past in order to re-think the itinerary of comparative political economy as well as alternative possibilities for emancipatory futures.

Henry A. Wallace Award Citation:

Navyug Gill’s Labors of Division: Global Capitalism and the Emergence of the Peasant in Colonial Panjab traces the invention of a peasantry in the context of colonialism and demonstrates how ‘landless laborer’ and ‘landowning peasant’ emerged as vital political, cultural, and economic categories in the making of global capitalism under colonialism. The ambitious book weaves together a wide variety of sources to generate a history that deeply troubles our received understanding of the role of ‘peasants’ and ‘the peasantry’ and the position of agriculture within the history of political economy. In Gill’s capable hands, we must reckon with the surprising idea that modernity was not the death of the peasant, but its site of origin. This book challenges a range of fields in the social sciences and humanities by questioning one of the fundamental categories—the peasant—mobilized at the birth of foundational political and economic theories across the disciplines. ​

Reviews of Labors of Division: 

"A luminous contribution to the itineraries of global capitalism! Gill upends agrarian political economy by dislodging the sedimented figure of the "peasant", revealing with rigor and verve how colonial categories of rule petrified amorphous social relations to land in British India, producing a caste-based division of labor and laborers with lasting and pernicious consequences for Panjab's subaltern classes."
—Vinay Gidwani, University of Minnesota

"In creative and challenging ways, Gill leads postcolonial analyses of colonial governmentality into an engagement with the history of capitalism, thereby opening the histories of capitalism and histories beyond the North Atlantic to each other."
—Andrew Sartori, New York University

"Labors of Division is an outstanding investigation of colonial market governance seen through the pivotal Punjabi peasant, elaborating postcolonial readings of political economy, the historiography of capitalism, and vernacular modernities. Gill compellingly illuminates the transformation of agrarian life-worlds through the workings and inhabitings of economic logics, from processes of caste standardization and hierarchization to the problem of indebtedness."
—Ritu Birla, University of Toronto

"Readers wishing to expand or revise their understanding of the divisions of agrarian labor in colonial Panjab and/or of Euromerican theoreticians analyzing class and capitalism will find rich insights in Gill's exposition. Highly recommended."
—Michael H. Fisher, ​Oberlin College

"Rather than analyze agrarian capitalism in the non-West as the outcome of failed, incomplete, or staggered transitions to capitalism, the book insists that Panjabi modernity was founded on the birth of the peasantry, rather than its death. Put more broadly—and boldly—capitalism did not eliminate the peasantry but produced it. In excavating this production, Gill forces a serious reconsideration of the foundations of peasant studies: the relationship of the peasantry to capitalist modernity, which was presumed to both require the existence of the peasant and facilitate their demise."
—Tanya Matthan, London School of Economics

"Navyug Gill's Labors of Division does a deep dive into the copious archive of the colonial state to give us the complex history of the making of the Punjabi peasant under the British Raj.... He has whetted the appetite for more such scholarly endeavors from his pen in the future."
—Anshu Malhotra, University of California - Santa Barbara