Evidence from colonial Malabar shows that attempts to explain long-run agrarian economic change in terms of the introduction or modification of land tenures alone – without reference to the production process and the political configuration of land-controlling groups – have been unsatisfactory. The article attempts to show that the specific impact on the economy of State intervention by means of tenurial reform was determined by the system of social production – in the case of Malabar, by garden and wetland paddy-dominated regimes and their different production requirements and class configurations. After examining a series of unsuccessful piecemeal tenurial reforms through the course of the early twentieth century, the paper goes on to argue that only from the 1930s, when small cultivators and agricultural workers under Left leadership became the main force of the organised agrarian movement, could landlordism and its concomitant politics begin to be weakened substantially. The long struggle against landlordism culminated in the passing of the Agrarian Relations Bill of 1958 and finally the Kerala Land Reforms (Amendment) Act in 1969.