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Middlemen are largely absent from the literature and policymaking on land deals. Based on qualitative evidence from India, this paper shows a highly organised field of aggregators, brokers, touts, musclemen and others permeating the land economy. Biographical accounts provide glimpses of everyday work, career and aspirations. A high-definition narrative of middlemen as middlemen allows a shift away from instrumental analyses of bridges in global capitalist accumulation. Even as they reproduce larger structures, middlemen can be rule-makers who personalise, localise and actively shape the land economy. Global debates cannot afford to ignore these hitherto missing dimensions in land deals.
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Nikita Sud (2014) studied this question.
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