Reprint of the original, first published in 1874.

With a focus on colonial Bengal, this book demonstrates how the dynamics of agrarian prosperity or decline, communal conflicts, poverty and famine can only be properly understood from an ecological perspective as well as discussions of state's coercion and popular resistance, market forces and dependency, or contested cultures and consciousness.

The "Gentleman's magazine" section is a digest of selections from the weekly press; the "(Trader's) monthly intelligencer" section consists of news (foreign and domestic), vital statistics, a register of the month's new publications, and a calendar of forthcoming trade fairs.

A few years ago, Bānlā little magazine reached the centenary of its origination. In Bengal (West Bengal and Bangladesh), the passion and enthusiasm about the little magazine supersedes that of Europe or America, but we are far behind the Western countries in terms of collection, preservation, and research of little magazines. The number of monographs or academic books on the Indian little magazine is too few, and such books in English are very rare. We believe that this book can remove that scarcity to some extent. The author of the present work has been closely associated with the movements of the little magazine as an author, editor, and organizer for no less than three decades. Those intimate experiences about such a kind of magazine are inscribed in this book. The text is not as dry as the research works used to be; anyone who is interested in Bānlā avant-garde magazines can enjoy this book.