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Progress and Problems: South Asian Economic and Social History c.1720–1860

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

D. A. Washbrook
D. A. Washbrook
Affiliation:
University of Warwick
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Extract

Over the last fifteen to twenty years, interest in the history of early modern and modern South Asia has grown enormously and has engaged the attention of an increasingly international audience. Whereas, at the end of the 1960s, research in the subject was largely confined to universities in South Asia itself and the rest of the British Commonwealth, today a variety of projects, conferences and regular workshops link together scholars from South Asia and the Commonwealth with those in Japan, Indonesia, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Italy, Eastern Europe and the United States. Equally, whereas twenty years ago the publication of South Asia-related research was restricted to a few specialist journals, today this research provides the staple of at least four quarterlies with major international circulations and appears regularly in most of the leading historical periodicals. In the last five years, monographys on South Asia related historical subjects have been published by presses in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, France, the Soviet Union and Japan as well as, of course, India and Pakistan, the rest of the Commonwealth and the United States.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , February 1988 , pp. 57 - 96
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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References

1 The extremely voluminous literature published over recent years on South Asian history c. 1720 –1860 makes it impossible, within the space available, either to provide a comprehensive survey or to review and critique with adequacy and justice the specific contriutions of individual historians. This paper is meant merely to promote the discussion of some general issues. Consequently, I have taken the liberty to keep references to a minimum and to use them as a general pointer towards large bodies of literature within which the general questions under discussion are raised.

2 The four major journals publishing a large amount of South Asian history are: The Indian Economic and Social History Review (IESHR); Modern Asian Studies (MAS); The Journal of Asian Studies (JAS); The journal of peasant Studies (JPS). Over the last five years, South Asia-related research has also appeared in: The Economic History Review; The Journal of Economic History; Comparative Studies in Society and History; Past and present; The Historical Journal; Itinerario; Review; Daedalus; etc.

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32 Frykenberg, R., Guntur District 1788–1848. (Oxford, 1965); Ludden, Peasant History; Stokes, The Peasant; Cohn, ‘Structural Change’.Google Scholar

33 Metcalf, Land; Appadurai, Worship; Frykenberg, R., ‘On Road and Riots in Tinnevelly’, South Asia 4, 2 (1982);Google ScholarWashbrook, D., ‘Ethnicity and Racism in Colonial India’ in Ross, R. (ed.), Race and Colonialism (The Hague, 1982).Google Scholar

34 Appadurai, Worship; Dirks, ‘From Little King’; Baker, Rural Economy.

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38 It need hardly be said that this point opens up a huge question concerning the relationship between exchange and capitalism. Braudel's conventions, by subsuming virtually all relations of exchange (or at least those mediated by money) under the label ‘capitalism’ may be judged teleological and certainly seem to miss the extent to which extended relations of exchange can have their roots and logic in attempts to safeguard subsistence under specific conditions. But space does not permit the pursuing of that line of inquiry here.

39 Stein, ‘Peasants, Politics’.Google Scholar

40 The decline in the relative share of the social product going to agricultural labour is well documented for the late nineteenth century onwards: see CEHI II (ch. III: 4); Baker, , Rural Economy. My own researches would suggest a decline, too, from the late 18th century.Google Scholar