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  1. Home
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  3. Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire
  • Cited by 207
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
March 2008
Print publication year:
1988
Online ISBN:
9781139053501
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521250924
Subjects:
Area Studies, South Asian History, Asian Studies, European History after 1450, History, European Studies
Series:
The New Cambridge History of India
Collection:
Cambridge Histories - Asian History
Information

Book description

The past twenty years have seen a proliferation of specialist scholarship on the period of India's transition to colonialism. This volume provides a synthesis of some of the most important themes to emerge from recent work and seeks in particular to reassess the role of Indians in the politics and economics of early colonialism. It discusses new views of the 'decline of the Moghuls' and the role of the Indian capitalists in the expansion of the English East Indian Company's trade and urban settlements. Professor Bayly considers the reasons for the inability of indigenous states to withstand the British, but also highlights the relative failure of the Company to transform India into a quiescent and profitable colony. Later chapters deal with changes in India's ecology, social organisation and ideologies in the nineteenth century, and analyse the nature of Indian resistance to colonialism, including the rebellion of 1857.

Reviews

‘A treat in store for all students of subcontinental history … an excellent read for any person interested in recent Indian history.’

Tariq Ali Source: The Guardian

‘A masterly work of synthesis and interpretation.’

Source: The Times Literary Supplement

‘A sophisticated and complex explanation for the failure of the indigenous States to resist British imperialism … a work of substantial scholarship providing not merely a synthesis of existing material but also original research.’

Source: The Times Higher Education Supplement

'… The result is a rewarding narrative and nuanced analysis of nineteenth-century colonization … Price's accomplishment is not only to put together one piece of a bigger puzzle but also to make clear the value of his interactive perspective on imperial encounters wherever they occurred.'

Source: The Journal of Interdisciplinary History

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Contents

Contents
  • 1 - India in the eighteenth century: the formation of states and social groups
    pp 7-44
  • View abstract

    Summary

    In the midst of military conflict and disruption, the eighteenth century witnessed a significant stage in the formation of the social order of modern India. This chapter starts by examining the changes in the imperial hegemony during the eighteenth century, then moves to the petty kingdoms and finally to the magnates of the villages who controlled production. A discussion of the Indian economy and society in the eighteenth century follows. Yet these divisions only constitute a device for organising themes. Developments at all these levels and in all these domains were linked. All powers seeking to establish their rule in eighteenth-century India needed to acquire imperial titles and rights. The spirit and forms of Mughal provincial government changed only slowly. The regional power-holders also inherited the problems of previous Mughal governors. The great non-Muslim warrior states, Marathas Sikhs and Jats, represented something more than simple devolutions of Mughal power to the provinces.
  • 2 - Indian capital and the emergence of colonial society
    pp 45-78
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Military entrepreneurs farmed revenue, engaged in local agricultural trade, and tried to build up holdings of zamindari land in the countryside. From the early eighteenth century the Company had emerged preeminent on India's external routes. In the case of Bengal, Indian mercantile capitalists allied with revenue entrepreneurs and disenchanted soldiers to encourage the expansionist ambition of Company servants. The operation of the new British courts which came into being after 1772, and the greater access to landed income afforded by the early colonial regime, offered them a secure base. The accommodation between British power and indigenous capital a relationship in which Indians were rapidly becoming subordinate was forcefully illustrated in the coastal cities. Indian merchants also took part in the rituals of the European city burgesses, filling several offices in the Madras Corporation which had been founded in 1688. In Surat, the English Company increased its control over its European and Indian rivals after 1730.
  • 3 - The crisis of the Indian state, 1780–1820
    pp 79-105
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter examines the working out of the processes of expansion both of the British and of the last independent Indian states. It commences with an overview of the new pressures on the Company's Indian establishments, which finally forged a European military despotism out of the loose congeries of independent mercantile corporations and Creole armies which it had been in Hasting's time. The political theory and practice of the Wellesley circle represented the first coherent imperial policy in British Indian history. The Company's rule in India had come to rest primarily on its military despotism. The subsidiary alliance system posed great problems both for the Indian states and for the British.
  • 4 - The consolidation and failure of the East India Company's state, 1818–57
    pp 106-135
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter demonstrates how the British maintained their fragile dominance over the subcontinent in the early years of the nineteenth century before considering this economic impasse and the attempts of administrators to escape from it. The Muslim law officers were maintained when the Bengal Regulations were extended to north India after 1793. This was important because it allowed those Muslim learned men who remained neutral on the question of whether Christian rule posed a threat to Islam to argue that some of the basic conditions of Muslim religious life were still preserved. The importance of the political element is even greater when one consider that the most valuable components of India's exports were themselves administrative rather than free trades. The Company's political aims and financial structure deepened the problems for both British and Indian entrepreneurs. The East India Company had penetrated the subcontinent by making use of its buoyant markets in produce and land revenue.
  • 5 - Peasant and Brahmin: consolidating ‘traditional’ society
    pp 136-168
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The result for the British was a long period of economic lethargy which was barely obscured by the slow introduction of the panoply of the modern state. Yet this should not be taken to imply that the early nineteenth century was an era devoid of significant social change. This chapter shows that these years were critical in the creation of the modern Indian peasantry, its patterns of social divisions and its beliefs. Others have argued that colonial rule was peripheral to most of Indian society: it could effect changes neither for good nor ill because the new export trades were fitful and the waves of reform and regeneration were merely paper debates conducted in the corridors of Government House, Calcutta. The chapter holds implications for the definition and operation of caste and for the practice of the Hindu, Muslim, Christian and Jain religions as they evolved during the nineteenth century. Rural people also turned to Muslim revitalisation and reform movements.
  • 6 - Rebellion and reconstruction
    pp 169-199
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter deals with rebellions and uprisings, none of which succeeded in excluding the influences of the world market or the Company's state. From its inception, the civilian rebellion and the mutinies reinforced each other. In all these movements there was conflict between landholder and tenants, agrarian labourer or tribal. One of the features of revolt was that the government had very little idea what was happening in the rebel-held areas and where information was available it generally concerned the activities of the great magnates. Elsewhere, quarrels within families seem to have been a major cause of revolt. The most dramatic and immediate consequences of the revolt were felt by the sepoy army itself and its rural allies. The Talukdars' Encumbered Estates Act of 1870 was echoed in Central India where the British opted for a landlord solution and in the Punjab where the few great magnates who had survived the terminal crisis of the Sikh state were prote.
  • Bibliographical essay
    pp 212-223
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This bibliography presents a list of titles that help the reader to understand the role of Indians in the politics and economics of early colonialism. The early history of European expansion in maritime India is one of the best covered areas of Indian history. Treatments of British expansion have concentrated on the commercial, particularly private commercial motivations and on the period of Robert Clive and Warren Hastings. A modern treatment of the Cornwallis and Wellesley period is still lacking, and there is little which discusses analytically the structure of the Company state or its ruling ideologies. The British revenue systems have generated an enormous and largely indigestible literature. Works on change in religion and mentalities are heavily concentrated on issues connected with the 'Bengal renaissance. There have been several attempts at overviews of Indian resistance in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.
References

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