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Bureaucracy and Ideology: Britain and India in the Nineteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2009

E. T. Stokes
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Extract

Historians love to sail under bare poles with the spares tophamper of theoretical disquisition. Yet in the last resort their differences resolve themselves largely into differences of methodology, and nowhere more patently than in the history of bureaucracy where contingency and a priori ideas have long contested for the key position in historical explanation. This must be the excuse for an historian of colonial rule who finds himself driven to study the richer historiography of bureaucracy in metropolitan Britain and to trace out its movement with the simplicity of caricature before he can settle to his satisfaction the mechanics of historical causation in government house and secretariat.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 30 , December 1980 , pp. 131 - 156
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1980

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