1st Regular Land Revenue Settlement of the District Bannu - 1879

The Report on the First Regular Land Revenue Settlement of the Bannu District, written by S.S. Thorburn and printed in 1879, is the official record of how the British measured, valued and taxed the land of Bannu in the 1870s. It was written by the officer who actually did the work, so what you read here comes straight from the man in the field and not from a later summary. This is a 22.2 MB scanned PDF of that original report.

What is this report about?

When the British took over the Bannu valley in 1848, they ran it with rough, temporary arrangements for years. A "regular settlement" was the proper job that followed: working out who held which land, how much it could produce, and how much revenue the government should take from it. Thorburn, the Settlement Officer, began this work in Bannu in 1872, and this report is the result. Bannu was then administered as part of the Punjab, in the Derajat Division.

What can you find inside?

• The land and its boundaries: how the district was laid out and described at the time.
• Villages and landholding: who held land, how it was divided, and how villages were recorded.
• The revenue system: how the assessment was worked out and what the people were asked to pay.
• Life in the district: the economy and farming conditions that the settlement had to take into account.

Who will find it useful?

Researchers and students of the history of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa will find it a solid primary source. It will also help anyone studying how land revenue worked under British rule, lawyers looking into the background of old land records, and people from Bannu who are curious about how their district was recorded nearly 150 years ago.

A few words about S.S. Thorburn

Septimus Smet Thorburn was an Indian Civil Service officer and the Settlement Officer of Bannu. Besides this report, he wrote Bannu; or Our Afghan Frontier (1876), a more readable book on the district's geography, history, people and land revenue, which also records local stories, ballads and proverbs. If you want to understand the region before diving into the settlement figures, reading that book alongside this report is a good way to start.

File details

Note: This is a scan of a 19th-century publication, so some pages may be faded, stained or hard to read. Spellings of place names and tribes follow the conventions of the 1870s and often differ from modern ones.