The Land Tax of India, According to the Moohummudan Law: Translated from the Futawa Alumgeeree, with explanatory notes, and an introductory essay, containing a brief exposition of leading principles, and their application to the present system of land revenue.

London and Bombay: Smith, Elder & Co., 1915. First edition. Liii, [1], 87, [1] pp. Publisher's plain brown boards with remains of paper spine label. Some pinhole worming, front endpaper excised but a very good and clean copy.A convoluted legal matter among the Muslims of the Bengal area. "The Muslim peasantry of eastern Bengal appears to have in part hung on its strong embrace of a powerful association between Islam and the plough. The Faraizi slogan langal jar, jami tar (“the land belongs to the tiller”) implied that bringing land under cultivation constituted the basis for a claim to its ongoing possession, or even to property in it. This idea was, as we have seen, hardly peculiar to the nineteenth century or exclusive to Muslim Bengal. But it was nonetheless a claim whose appeal to religious authority was unlikely to have found much of a foundation in the currents of Hanafi jurisprudence that had been elaborated in the period from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries when Muslim agrarian society was emerging in the eastern delta. In that process, those best positioned to claim property on the basis of historical investments in reclamation and improvement were gentry lineages claiming descent from the pir (or saint) who had initiated the sedentarization and Islamicization of the area. The actual rent-paying, cultivating tenants had little grounds in Muslim law for any comparable claim" (A. Satori; Property and Political Norms: Hanfi Juristic Discourse In Agrarian Bengal). In Baillie's book the issue is broken down and elucidated and the reason was likely to make the taxes levied upon the Muslims of the area understandable to their British overlords.