Creator's Description: This article investigates the relationships between political space and socio-economic organization in the lower Spiti Valley, a Tibetan-speaking area in Himachal Pradesh, India. Of main concern are the periods between 1846 and 1947 when Spiti was under British rule and the development after India gained its independence in 1947. The paper traces the changes in the system of land law as they affected the taxpayer (khral pa) households in the nineteenth century and in particular since the mid-twentieth century led to the emergence of a subordinate stratum of a continuously growing number of independent permanent households (khang chung) with relatively small amounts of land. In particular an attempt is made to reconstruct the socio-economic organization and the taxation system in the nineteenth-twentieth century as well as the development of the administrative and socio-economic structure between 1947 and 2000. This is followed by a comparative analysis of the growth of the population and number of households which is concluded by observations on inheritance and marriage patterns.