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Unifying Themes in the History of British India, 1757-1857: An Historiographical Analysis*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

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Abstract

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Review Article
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Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1985

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Footnotes

*

Professor Green wishes to acknowledge research support from the Rockefeller Foundation and the American Philosophical Society. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of the United States Department of State.

References

1 Indian troops were used in the Crimean War, in Persia (1856-57), China (1859), Ethiopia (1867); they were dispatched to the Mediterranean during the crisis of 1878, used in Egypt (1882), the Sudan (1896-98), in both world wars, and in numerous lesser encounters.

2 There is an expanding literature on Indian indenture. See Saunders, Kay, ed., Indentured Labour in the British Empire, 1834-1920 (London, 1984)Google Scholar; Tinker, Hugh, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830-1920 (London, 1971)Google Scholar; Cumpston, I.M., Indians in Overseas British Territories, 1834-1854 (London, 1953)Google Scholar; Gangulee, N., Indians in the Empire Overseas (London, 1947)Google Scholar; Kondapi, C., Indians Overseas 1838-1949 (Madras, 1951)Google Scholar; Nath, Dwarka, A History of Indians in British Guiana (London, 1950)Google Scholar; Weller, Judith Ann, East Indian Indenture in Trinidad (Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico, 1968).Google Scholar

3 At the end of the nineteenth century, the British determined that about 150 separate vernacular languages were spoken in India. Khursheed Kamal Aziz claims that no Indian “could claim to know India”; the most he could hope to know intimately was “his own province or perhaps some areas in the neighborhood.” See his The British in India: A Study in Imperialism (Islamabad, 1976), p. 170.Google Scholar

4 Mookerji, Radha Kumud, Fundamental Unity of India (London, 1914)Google Scholar and Nationalism in Hindu Culture (4th edn, Dehli 1957, 1st edn, 1921).Google Scholar

5 R.C. Majumdar offers a comprehensive analysis of nationalist historical writing in Philips, C.H., ed., Historians of India, Pakistan, and Ceylon (London, 1961), pp. 416–28.Google Scholar

6 Sen, S.P. and Majumdar, R.C. in Sen, S.P., ed., Historians and Historiography in Modern India (Calcutta, 1973), pp. xiii-xv, xviixxiii.Google Scholar

7 Marshall, P.J., “British Expansion in India in the Eighteenth Century: A Historical Revision,” History 60 (1975): 38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Studies of the Aligarh school generally representing this view are Chandra, Satish, Parties and Politics at the Mughal Court, 1707-1740 (Aligarh, 1959)Google Scholar, Ali, M. Athar, The Mughal Nobility Under Aurangzeb (Aligarh, 1966)Google Scholar, and Siddiqi, Norman Ahmad, Land Revenue Administration under the Mughals (1700-1750) (New York, 1970).Google Scholar

9 Habib, Irfan, The Agrarian System of Mughal India (Bombay, 1963).Google Scholar

10 Richards, J.F., “The Imperial Crisis in the Deccan,” Journal of Asian Studies 35 (1976): 237256CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Richards thinks that there were ample lands in newly acquired regions to supply most of the nobles' requirements if the emperor had distributed them properly. Northern rank-holders, he argues, opposed the inclusion of “pot black” southern Hindu noblemen into the Mughal elite.

11 Pearson, M.N., “Shivaji and the Decline of the Mughal Empire,” Journal of Asian Studies 35 (1976): 221235Google Scholar. For a review of Richards and Pearson, see Hardy, Peter, “Commentary and Critique,” Journal of Asian Studies 35 (1976): 257263CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Both Pearson and Richards agree with Aligarh historians that Mughal decline was well underway in the final half of the seventeenth century. Earlier views, represented in Spear's, PercivalA History of India (Baltimore, 1965), vol. IIGoogle Scholar, held that Mughal power remained largely intact until the death of Aurangzeb. In his The Passing of Empire: The Mughal Case,” Modern Asian Studies 9 (1975): 385–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar, M. Athar Ali places Mughal decline in a global world-systems context. For an argument that Mughal decline was not as irreversible as writers of Indian history have implied, see Heesterman, J.C., “Was There an Indian Reaction? Western Expansion in Indian Perspective,” in Wesseling, H.L., ed., Expansion and Reaction: Essays on European Expansion and Recations in Asia and Africa (Leiden, 1978), p. 35.Google Scholar

12 Leonard, Karen, “The ‘Great Firm’ Theory of the Decline of the Mughal Empire,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 21 (1979): 151167.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 Other works on the Mughals include: Chopra, Pran Nath, Some Aspects of Society and Culture during the Mughal Ages (1526-1707), 2nd ed. (Agra, 1963)Google Scholar; Habib, Irfan, “Potentialities of Capitalistic Development in the Economy of Mughal India,” Journal of Economic History 29 (1969): 3278CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hardy, Peter, The Muslims of British India (Cambridge, 1972)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hasan, Ibn, The Central Structure of the Mughal Empire (1936; reprinted, London 1970)Google Scholar; Naqvi, H.K., Urbanization and Urban Centres under the Great Mughals (Simla, 1971)Google Scholar; Qureshi, I.H., The Administration of the Mughal Empire (Karachi, 1966)Google Scholar; Richards, J.F., Mughal Administration in Golconda (Oxford, 1975)Google Scholar; Roy, A.C., History of Bengal: Mughal Period, 1526-1765 (Calcutta, 1968)Google Scholar; Sarkar, Judunath Sir, Fall of the Mughal Empire, 4 vols. (Calcutta, 1957)Google Scholar; SirSarkar, Judunath, Mughal Administration, 4th ed. (Calcutta, 1957).Google Scholar

14 Khan, A.M., The Transition in Bengal (Cambridge, 1969)Google Scholar. Anil Chandra Banerjee has examined British relations with Rajputana as well as British involvement in the first Burmese War. See his The Rajput States and the East India Company (Calcutta, 1957)Google Scholar and The Eastern Frontier of British India 1784-1826 2nd ed. (Calcutta, 1946)Google Scholar. For Assam, Rebati Mohan Lahir, The Annexation of Assam, 1824-1854 (Calcutta, 1975)Google Scholar. Engagements between the British and Marathas from 1770 to 1818 are treated in the final volume of Sardesai's, Govind SakharamThe New History of the Marathas (Bombay, 19461948)Google Scholar. For the south, see Sobhanan, B., Rama Varma of Travancore, His Role in the Consolidation of British Power in South India (Calcutta, 1951).Google Scholar

15 Gallagher, John and Robinson, Ronald, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” The Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 6 (1953): 115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 Fieldhouse, D.K., Economics and Empire 1830-1914 (Ithaca, 1973).Google Scholar

17 Imperialism and Free Trade: Lancashire and India in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Vancouver, 1972), pp. 4, 69Google Scholar. Relations between British cotton magnates and India is well treated in Silver, Arthur W., Manchester Men and Indian Cotton 1847-1872 (Manchester, 1966).Google Scholar

18 Fieldhouse, , Economics and Empire, p. 174.Google Scholar

19 Huttenback, Robert, British Relations with Sind 1799-1843 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1962), p. 29Google Scholar. Huttenback considered the annexation of Sind initially spurred by commercial interests. The region commanded the lower Indus, and the British believed the river would afford a highway for trade to Central Asia. After annexation, the river was found not fully navigable.

20 The most thorough analysis of the conquest and subsequent administration of Sind is a beautifully written and richly detailed work by Limbrick, H.T., Sir Charles Napier and Sind (Oxford, 1952).Google Scholar

21 Singh, Khushwant, A History of the Sikhs, vol. II: 1839-1964 (Princeton, 1966), pp. 3137Google Scholar. For other analyses of internal disintegration and British annexation, see Hasrat, B.J., Anglo-Sikh Relations 1799-1849. A Reappraisal of the Rise and Fall of the Sikhs (Hoshiapur, 1968)Google Scholar; Gupta, Hari Ram, ed., Punjab on the Eve of the Sikh War (Hoshiapur, 1956)Google Scholar. Mohjan's, J.Circumstances Leading to the Annexation of the Punjab, 1846-1849 (Allahabad, 1949)Google Scholar is particularly hostile to British policy.

22 Pemble's, JohnThe Raj, the Indian Mutiny, and the Kingdom of Oudh, 1801-1859 (Rutherford, N.J., 1977)Google Scholar is a rich and sympathetic book on Oudh and its capital city, Lucknow.

23 Gerald Graham observed that after 1815 Britain was immune from serious overseas competition, enjoying for the first and only time a “comfortable ‘splendid isolation.’” France was prostrate as a colonial and maritime force; the Dutch were restored to empire at suffrance; and the Portuguese and Spanish were feeble. With little more than two squadrons, the Royal Navy amply protected eastern waters from European competition. Great Britain in the Indian Ocean: A Study of Maritime Enterprise 1810-1850 (Oxford, 1967), pp. 13.Google Scholar

24 Vol. I, Discovery and Revolution (London, 1952)Google ScholarPubMed; Vol. II, New Continents and Changing Values (London, 1964)Google Scholar. See, in particular, Vol. I, chapter 3, “The Swing to the East.”

25 Williams, Eric, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, 1944), p. 13.Google Scholar

26 Green, William A, British Slave Emancipation: The Sugar Colonies and the Great Experiment, 1830-1865 (Oxford, 1976), p. 73Google Scholar. In 1818, five years after the renewed East India Company charter had opened the trade of India to independent merchants, only 36 of the 1723 vessels departing Liverpool for outside the United Kingdom sailed to India.

27 Mackay, D.L., “Direction and Purpose in British Imperial Policy, 1783-1801,” The Historical Journal 17 (1974): 487501.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28 Misra, G.S., British Foreign Policy and Indian Affairs, 1783-1815 (New York, 1963).Google Scholar

29 Ingram, Edward, “The Rules of the Game: A Commentary on the Defense of British India, 1798-1829,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 3 (1975): 257279CrossRefGoogle Scholar; The Beginning of the Great Game in Asia, 1828-1834 (New York, 1979)Google Scholar. See, also, Alder, G.J., “Britain and the Defense of India—The Origins of the Problem, 1798-1815,” Journal of Asian History 6 (1972): 1444.Google Scholar

30 Norris, J.A., The First Afghan War, 1838-1842 (Cambridge, 1967)Google Scholar. An excellent new study on Indian frontier policy, Yapp's, M.E.Strategies of British India: Britain, Iran, and Afghanistan, 1798-1850 (Oxford, 1980)Google Scholar, denies that defense against the Russians was the principal determinant of frontier policy. Rather, it was the fear of internal revolt that most worried the rulers of India and often propelled them into adventurous actions on the frontiers. Yapp strongly affirms the Fieldhouse view that decisions to extend British territory arose on the periphery. He declares Indian imperialism bureaucratic, not economic, and he observes that divided responsibilities for India in London allowed vital decisions to be taken in the subcontinent.

31 In his Beginning of the Great Game, p. 328, Ingram acknowledges that the Eastern Question (what to do about the decline of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century) and the Great Game are two sides of the same coin and must be studied together. Important works include: Alder, G.J., British India's Northern Frontier, 1865-1895: study in Imperial Policy (London, 1963)Google Scholar; Bilgrami, A.H., Afghanistan and British India, 1793-1907 (New Delhi, 1972)Google Scholar; Edwardes, Michael, Playing the Great Game: A Victorian Cold War (London, 1975)Google Scholar; Gleason, John, The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain (Cambridge, Mass., 1950)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Miller, Charles, Khyber, British India's Northwest Frontier: The Story of an Imperial Migräne (New York, 1977).Google Scholar

32 For a chronological survey of administrative and institutional developments, the Cambridge History of the British Empire: vol. IV, British India remains invaluable. Marshall's, P.J. short Problems of Empire: Britain and India 1757-1813 (London and New York, 1968)Google Scholar provides beginning students a succinct and more up-to-date analysis of administrative organization, company problems, and the evolving imposition of control by the metropolitan government. Sutherland, L.S., The East India Company in Eighteenth-century Politics (Oxford, 1952)Google Scholar and Philips, C.H., The East India Company, 1784-1834 (Manchester, 1940Google Scholar; reprinted, 1961) are the most detailed studies of internal operations of the Company, though they concentrate heavily upon the Company as an English institution in an English political environment. Furber's, HoldenJohn Company at Work (Cambridge, Mass., 1948; reprinted, 1970)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Parkinson's, C. NorthcoteTrade in the Eastern Seas 1793-1813 (Cambridge, 1937)Google Scholar provide rich and elegantly written analyses of Company institutions and Company servants in an Asian setting. For an evaluation of earlier developments in the East India Company, see Chaudhuri, K.N., The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company 1660-1760 (Cambridge, 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Misra's, B.B. two works span the whole period: The Central Administration of the East India Company 1773-1834 (Manchester, 1959)Google Scholar; The Administrative History of India, 1834-1947: General Administration (Bombay, 1970)Google Scholar. For an insight into the role of chairmen of the Board of Directors of the Company, see Embree's, AinslieCharles Grant and British Rule in India (New York, 1962)Google Scholar; the role of President of the Board of Control is described in Furber, Holden, Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville (London, 1931)Google Scholar. Highly useful studies of prominent Anglo-Indian administrators include: Franklin, and Wickwire, Mary, Cornwallis: The Imperial Years (Chapel Hill, 1980)Google Scholar; Beaglehole, T.H., Thomas Munro and the Development of Administrative Policy in Madras (Cambridge, 1966)Google Scholar; Choksey, R.D., Mountstuart Elphinstone: The Indian Years, 1796-1827 (Bombay, 1971)Google Scholar; Panigrahi, D.N., Charles Metcalfe in India: Ideas and Administration, 1806-1835 (Delhi, 1968)Google Scholar; Rosselli, John, Lord William Bentinck (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1974)Google Scholar; and Ghosh, Suresh Chandra, Dalhousie in India, 1848-56: A Study of His Social Policy as Governor General (New Delhi, 1975)Google Scholar. Woodruff's, PhilipThe Men Who Ruled India, 2 vols. (London, 19531954)Google Scholar is a sympathetic overview of Indian administration and administrators. Publication of The Correspondence of Lord William Cavendish Bentinck, Governor-General of India, 1828-1835, 2 vols., edited by Philips, C.H. (Oxford, 1977)Google Scholar provides a mine of information on administrative procedures.

33 Felling's, KeithWarren Hastings (London, 1954)Google Scholar provides limited treatment of his subject's orientalism. One must turn to the Memoirs of the Life of Right Honorable Warren Hastings, 2 vols., compiled by Gleig, G.K. (London, 1841)Google Scholar. Marshall, P.J., ed., The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1970)Google Scholar offers selections from British orientalists written between 1767-1790. Three of those selections are from William Jones, the subject of two recent biographies: SirMukherjee, S.N.William Jones: A Study in Eighteenth-Century British Attitudes to India (Cambridge, 1968)Google Scholar and Cannon, G., Oriental Jones (New York, 1964)Google Scholar. Kopf, David, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: the Dynamics of Indian Modernization 1773-1835 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969)Google Scholar provides unmatched coverage of the evolution of Anglo-Indian orientalism to its demise in the Bentinck period.

34 It might also be argued that anglicism was advanced by the course of events. After 1765, Clive established dual government in Bengal whereby the East India Company collected revenue and administered some aspects of civil justice while a native Bengali administration managed other areas of government. A power vacuum ensued: Indian authority melted away; Company servants seized opportunities for plunder; famine devoured three million people; and Company authorities, admitting failure of dual government, chose to assume full sovereignty. Parliament twice intervened (1773 and 1784) to impose western forms of regulation upon Company operations, and during the governor generalship of Lord Cornwallis, 1786-1793, an anglicist orientation to British rule was affirmed. Cornwallis considered Indian misery the result of unwarranted indulgence in Asiatic principles of government. He removed Indians from important offices. British principles of administration were laid down, and the all-important land revenue question was settled on an English model.

35 Mill published his six-volume History of British India in 1817, joined the East India Company in 1819, and became head examiner (a virtual undersecretary of state for India) before his death in 1836.

35 Excellent analyses of the relationship between utilitarians and India are offered in Hutchins, Francis G., The Illusion of Permanence: British Imperialism in India (Princeton, 1967)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Bearce, George D., British Attitudes Towards India, 1784-1858 (London, 1961)Google Scholar. The latter work is a superb guide to the whole range of British attitudes and an invaluable aid to beginning scholars of British Indian history. Stokes', EricThe English Utilitarians and India (Oxford, 1959)Google Scholar is the definitive work on the subject.

37 Grant served the Company in India after 1768 and subsequently became Director and Chairman, member of parliament, and participant in the Clapham sect. He wrote an extended tract, “Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, particularly with Respect to Morals; and on the Means of Improving It,” which was subsequently printed for parliament in 1812-1813 and 1831-1832. This influential statement is thoroughly analyzed in Embree's, AinsleeCharles Grant and British Rule in India, pp. 141157.Google Scholar

38 William Wilberforce, evangelical spokesman in parliament, and leader of the campaign to abolish the slave trade, expressed a common view that “next to the Slave Trade…our making no effort to introduce the blessings of religious and moral improvement among our subjects in the East [is] the greatest of our national crimes.” Pollack, John, Wilberforce (New York, 1978), pp. 235236.Google Scholar

39 Potts, E. Daniel, British Baptist Missionaries in India 1793-1837: The History of Serampore and its Missions (Cambridge, 1967)Google Scholar; Oddie, G.A., Social Protest in India: British Protestant Missionaries and Social Reforms 1850-1900 (New Delhi, 1978)Google Scholar. Laird's, M.A.Missionaries and Education in Bengal 1793-1837 (Oxford, 1972)Google Scholar is particularly cautious. Laird produced a preliminary study on the Baptists, The Contribution of the Serampore Missionaries to Education in Bengal, 1793-1837,” London University: School of Oriental and African Studies Bulletin 13 (1968): 92112Google Scholar. Forrester, Duncan B., Caste and Christiantity: Attitudes and Policies on Caste of Anglo-Saxon Protestant Missions in India (London, 1980)Google Scholar shows the extent to which caste was an impediment to conversion. For another view, see Ali, Muhammed Mohar, The Bengal Reaction to Christian Missionary Activities 1833-1857 (Chittagong, 1965).Google Scholar

40 Panikkar, K.M., Asia and Western Dominance (London, 1953), p. 422Google Scholar; Basu, B.D., History of Education in India under the Rule of the East India Company (Calcutta, n.d.), p. 206Google Scholar. For a review of this literature, see Potts, , British Baptist Missionaries, pp. 243244.Google Scholar

41 Even Kshiti Mohan Sen, a spokesman for popular Hinduism in the late 1950s, acknowledged India's debt to the missionaries. Hinduism (Harmondsworth, 1961), p. 20Google ScholarPubMed. Charles Heimsath argues that the base of modern Indian reform lies in the ethical doctrines of Christianity and the concept of human personality expressed in the Christian faith. See his, Indian Nationalism and Hindu Social Reform (Princeton, 1964), p. 51.Google Scholar

42 Nurullah, Syed and Naik, J.P., A History of Education in India (During the British Period) (Calcutta and London, 1951)Google Scholar. These authors provide an analysis of the indigenous forms of education in India at the beginning of the nineteenth century; they compare contemporary Indian practices with those of England (not unfavorably in many qualitative terms); and they argue that indigenous institutions could have and should have formed the basis of a national system of education in India. See pages 38-50.

43 Trevelyan, G. Otto, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay (New York, 1875), 1:355Google Scholar. For a contemporary endorsement of the anglicist principle, see Trevelyan, C.E., On the Education of the People of India (1838)Google Scholar. Trevelyan's work is analyzed by Hilliker, J.F., “C.E. Trevelyan as an Educational Reformer in India 1827-38,” Canadian Journal of History 9 (1974): 275291.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

44 Spear minimized Macaulay's personal intervention and demonstrated that the power of English utilitarian-evangelical reformism rendered Bentinck's action inevitable. Bentinck and Education,” Cambridge Historical Journal 1 (1938): 77101Google Scholar. Kenneth Ballhatchet objected to Spear's English orientation, arguing that home authorities were, at first, hostile to the Bentinck resolution. See his, The Home Government and Bentinck's Educational Policy,” Cambridge Historical Journal 10 (1951): 224229CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Ballhatchet insisted upon an Indian rather than English context for the decision, and other scholars, notably Gerald and Natalie Sirkin, have followed his lead. Although they reaffirm the importance of Macaulay's intervention, the Sirkins argue that the Bentinck judgement can be understood only in the context of the anglicist-orientalist debate within India. Gerald, and Sirkin, Natalie, “The Battle of Indian Education: Macaulay's Opening Salvo Newly Discovered,” Victorian Studies 14 (19701971): 407428Google Scholar. John Rosselli's recent biography of Bentinck brings the debate full circle. Inclining toward Spear, he discounts the role of Macaulay and emphasizes instead the utilitarian administrative orientation of the governor general. Roselli, , Lord William Bentinck, pp. 214225Google Scholar. The Bentinck resolution did not seal the fate of vernacular education: it soon became apparent that an elitist filter-down system would not suffice; some attention was given to vernacular elementary education, but emphasis on conquest and consolidation of power in the 1840s exhausted resources which might have been devoted to a broader educational structure. Palet, Chittabrata, “Vernacular Education and the Structure of Politics in Bengal (1835-1870),” Quarterly Review of Historical Studies 15 (1976): 163172.Google Scholar

45 Active resistance to British presence has been described in two books by Chaudhuri, Sashi Bhusan [Disturbances During the British Rule in India (1765-1857) (Calcutta, 1955)Google Scholar; Civil Rebellion in the Indian Mutinies, 1857-59 (Calcutta, 1957)Google Scholar]. There is not a large or inviting literature on violent resistance before the Mutiny.

46 Cohn's, Bernard S.The Initial British Impact on India: A Case Study of the Benares Region,” Journal of Asian Studies 19 (19591960): 418431CrossRefGoogle Scholar, treats Indian bureaucrats and landholders who rose in the wake of British conquest.

47 Bengal Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: the Dynamics of Indian Modernization, 1773-1835 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969)Google Scholar; The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind (Princeton, 1979Google Scholar).

48 For a concise statement of Kopf's views on the oriental tradition and modernization, see his Hermeneutics versus History,” Journal of Asian Studies 39 (1980): 495506CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Dipesh Chakrabarty offers a hostile view of renaissance figures identifying leaders of the movement with “colonialism.” The Colonial Context of the Bengal Renaissance: A Note on Early Railway-Thinking in Bengal,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 11 (1974): 92111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

49 Arya Dharm: Hindu Consciousness in Nineteenth Century Punjab (Berkeley, 1976).Google Scholar

50 The term caste derives from the Portuguese “casta”; the Indian term for the system is “jati.” For an analysis of the centuries-long efforts to understand caste, see Cohn, Bernard S., “Notes on the History of the Study of Indian Society and Culture,” in Singer, Milton and Cohn, Bernard, Structure and Change in Indian Society (Chicago, 1968).Google Scholar

51 See Resiliency and Change in the Indian Caste System: The Umar of U.P.,” Journal of Asian Studies 26 (1967): 575587CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In an edited work, Aspects of Caste in South India, Ceylon and North-west Pakistan (New York, 1960)Google Scholar, E.R. Leach argued that ambiguity of meaning has been a central problem in studying caste. He isolated two distinct uses of the word, one by anthropologists who employ it to refer “exclusively to a system of social organization particular to Hindu India,” and another by sociologists who use it to describe “any kind of class structure of exceptional rigidity.” Andre Beteille firmly distinguishes between caste and class in modern India. See, Caste, Class and Power: Changing Patterns of Stratification in a Tanjore Village (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969), pp. 34.Google Scholar

52 Each varna constituted a class in Aryan society. The system institutionalized the position of the Brahmana (priests) at the top of Indian society. Behind them was the warrior/ruling class; then the commercial class; and at the base—servants of the other three—were Sudras. Non-Aryans were included with slaves and foreigners in the lowest class.

53 Dumont, Louis, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implication, translated by Sainsbury, Mark (Chicago, 1970).Google Scholar

54 Singh, Hira, “Kin, Caste and Kisan Movement in Marwar: Some Questions to the Conventional Sociology of Kin and Caste,” Journal of Peasant Studies 7 (1979): 101118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

55 The most extensively used list appears in Hutton, J.H., Caste in India: Its Nature, Function and Origin (1946; 3rd ed. Bombay, 1961).Google Scholar

56 Aggarwal, Partap C., Caste, Religion and Power: An Indian Case Study (New Delhi, 1971)Google Scholar; Andre Beteille, Caste, Class, and Power; E.K. Gough, “Caste in a Tanjore Village,” in E.R. Leach, Aspects of Caste; and Miller, Donald B., From Hierarchy to Stratification: Changing Patterns of Social Inequality in a North Indian Village (Dehli, 1975).Google Scholar

57 Conlon, Frank F., A Caste in a Changing World: The Chitrapur Saraswat Brahmans, 1700-1935 (Berkeley, 1977)Google Scholar; Inden, Donald B., Marriage and Rank in Bengali Culture: A History of Caste and Clan in Middle Period Bengal (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1976)Google Scholar; Kumar, Dharma, Land and Caste in South India: Agricultural Labour in Madras Presidency in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1965)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Leonard, Karen, Social History of an Indian Caste: The Kayasthas of Hyderabad (Berkeley, 1978).Google Scholar

58 Cohn, , “Notes on the History of Study of Indian Society and Culture,” pp. 328Google Scholar, offers a review of this literature; also, Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus; Scrinivas, M.N., Caste in Modern India (Bombay, 1962)Google Scholar; and Rowe, William L., “Mobility in the Nineteenth Century Caste System,” in Singer, and Cohn, , eds., Structure and Change, pp. 201207.Google Scholar

59 Fox, , “Resiliency and Change,” p. 575.Google Scholar

60 Carroll, Lucy, “Caste, Social Change, and the Social Scientist: A note on the Ahistorical Approach to Indian Social History,” Journal of Asian Studies 35 (1975): 63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

61 For a standard older treatment, see Smith, Vincent A., The Oxford History of India (Oxford, 1923)Google Scholar. A nineteenth-century author, J. Talboys Wheeler expressed sublime faith in Britain's ability to shape India. In describing the effects of the Permanent Settlement, he wrote: The permanence of the landed settlement tended to fossilize the people of Bengal, until an English education broke the trammels of ages, and opened out new careers of advancement to the rising generation.” A Short History of India (London, 1880)Google Scholar. Nationalist authors were equally convinced that Britons had the power to transform Indian life. Nehru charged that the Permanent Settlement, having been designed to establish proprietary rights destroyed communal ownership and the corporate character of Indian village life. See his The Discovery of India (New York, 1946), pp. 217219.Google Scholar

62 Some Aspects of the Permanent Settlement in Bengal,” Economic History Review, 2nd. ser., 7 (1954): 204215.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

63 Stokes, , The English Utilitarians and India, pp. 7580.Google Scholar

64 Guha, Ranajit, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay in the Idea of the Permanent Settlement (Paris, 1963)Google Scholar; Gupta, Sulekh Chandra, Agrarian Relations and Early British Rule (Bombay, 1963)Google Scholar. Guha affirmed Wright's emphasis on physiocratic influences whereas Gupta emphasized utilitarian thinking.

65 Beaglehole, , Thomas Munro and the Development of Administrative Policy in Madras (Berkeley, 1966).Google Scholar

66 The Ryotwari System in Madras, 1792-1827 (Calcutta, 1962).Google Scholar

67 Klein, Ira, “Utilitarians and Agrarian Problems in Western India,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 18 (1965): 576597CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also, Rabitray, Neil, “System v. Expediency: The Reality of Land Revenue Administration in the Bombay Presidency, 1812-1820,” Modern Asian Studies 9 (1975): 529546.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

68 Thorner, Daniel, The Agrarian Prospect in India (Delhi, 1956).Google Scholar

69 Neale, Walter, Economic Change in Rural India: Land Tenure and Reform in Uttar Pradesh, 1800-1955 (New Haven, 1962)Google Scholar. For a study of land revenue administration, taxation, and agriculture in the Uttar Pradesh during a briefer period, see Siddiqi, Asiya, Agrarian Change in a Northern Indian State: Uttar Pradesh, 1819-1833 (Oxford, 1973).Google Scholar

70 Kumar, , Land and Caste in South India: Agricultural Labour in Madras Presidency in the Nineteenth Century, (Cambridge, 1965).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

71 Frykenberg expanded on this analysis in his edited work, Land Control and Social Structure in Indian History (Madison, 1969)Google Scholar, a valuable collection that includes a contribution by Burton Stein which argues that Frykenberg's description of conditions in the Guntur District could be replicated in most areas of the Madras Presidency (p. 203). Frykenberg has continued his evaluation of British administration in a contribution to Fox, Richard G., ed., Realm and Reign in Traditional India (Durham, N.C., 1977)Google Scholar. There he reaffirmed that the East India Company obtained hegemony in the south by acting as a local force within the indigenous power structure. He denies that British intervention involved major cultural disruption or the destruction of prevailing institutions. In a similar vein, Ratna Ray shows that even in Bengal the disruptions often presumed to have occurred through the Permanent Settlement were not revolutionary and that, in practice, Cornwallis' measure tended to consolidate the position of the smaller gentry, not precipitate real transfers of property to Calcutta's merchant class as has been generally assumed. Land Transfer and Social Change Under the Permanent Settlement: A Study of Two Localities,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 11 (1974): 145CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Ray's work was inspired in part by a London University thesis, 1972, which has since been published: Islam, Sirajul, The Permanent Settlement in Bengal. A Study of Its Operation, 1790-1819 (Dacca, 1979)Google Scholar. Mishra's, GirishAgrarian Problems of Permanent Settlement: A Case Study of Camparan (Delhi, 1978Google Scholar) constitutes another bottom up analysis. Also, see Rajat, and Ray, Ratna, “Zamindars and Jotedars: A Study of Rural Politics in Bengal,” Modern Asian Studies 9 (1975): 81102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

72 Stokes, Eric, The Peasant and the Raj: Studies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion in Colonial India (New York and London, 1978).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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74 Cornish, Selwyn, “Recent Writing in Indian Economic History,” Journal of Economic History 37 (1977): 762.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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76 For an analysis of the “drain” theory, see Ganguli, B.N., Dadhabhi Naoroji and the Drain Theory (Calcutta, 1965).Google Scholar

77 An early statement of the imperialist position in SirStrachey, John, India: Its Administration and Progress (London, 1903)Google Scholar. Sir Reginald Coupland offered a summary statement of the effects of British rule on the eve of independence, India: A Restatement (London, 1945)Google Scholar, and Sir Percival Griffiths, a former Indian civil servant, provided a positive, if mixed, view of British rule. See The British Impact on India (London, 1952)Google Scholar. See also SirMorison, Theodor, The Economic Transition in India (London, 1911)Google Scholar; Anstey, Vera, The Economic Development of India, 3rd ed. (London, 1936)Google Scholar; and Knowles, L.C.A., Economic Development of the British Overseas Empire (London, 1924).Google Scholar

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79 We use the terms, nationalist and imperialist, relunctantly. Those who hold, or have held, what might be called a nationalist opinion are not necessarily Indian. The imperialists, on the other hand, are not necessarily sentimental apologists for empire. Those who consider imperial structures to have provided positive influences for Indian development are, for want of a better word, denominated imperialists in this controversy.

80 Toru Matsui, “On the Nineteenth-Century Indian Economic History—A Review of a ‘Reinterpretation’”; Bipan Chandra, “Reinterpretation of Nineteenth Century Indian Economic History”; and Tapan Raychaudhuri, “A Re-interpretation of Nineteenth Century Economic History?” These articles were collected with Morris' initial article and his subsequent rejoinder, “Trends and Tendencies in Indian Economic History,” in a single volume, Morris, et al, Indian Economy in the Nineteenth Century: A Symposium (Delhi, 1969).

81 Raychaudhuri, “A Re-interpretation,” in ibid. p. 97.

82 Chaudhuri, K.N., “India's International Economy in the Nineteenth Century: An Historical Survey,” Modern Asian Studies 11 (1968): 3150CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Chaudhuri notes that the ratio between the value of foreign trade and national income were not constant over the nineteenth century and that the “drain” might have been more important in the first half of the century (p. 43). This is the conclusion one reaches from his earlier article, India's Foreign Trade and the Cessation of the East India Company's Trading Activities, 1828-40,” The Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 19 (1966): 345363.Google Scholar

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86 Weber, Max, The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism, translated and edited by Gerth, Hans H. and Martindale, Don (Glencoe, III., 1958).Google Scholar

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91 Cambridge History of India, vol. 2, p. 33.Google Scholar

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