Once the British Empire became world-wide, the sun never set upon its crises. The historian who studies any of these crises in isolation does so at his peril, for their consequences tended to interlock. In the astounding geometry which the British Government constructed across the map of tropical Africa, many of the lines they drew were guided by pressures far away, in Ireland, in Egypt and in India. During the years between 1919 and 1922 a new and more elaborate set of crises marched indefatigably on through the body politic of Empire, like gout through the enfeebled frame of a toper. By this time Britain was threatened by the rolling up of her old interests in East Asia as well as by the phasing out of her new interests in West Asia; while in the classical centres of disaffection Zaghul Pasha, Gandhi and Mr de Valera pursued the old aims by new methods. No analysis of any of these crises will be complete without establishing its interplay with the others. Each joined in the rataplan which frayed the minds and the nerves of the policy-makers. But at a deeper level, each of them was part of a general problem; and there is much to be said for studying problems, not regions. In the case of underdeveloped subjects, such as African or Indian history, it is important not to study them as though they were merely the annals of the parish.

During the last ninety years of British rule in India, the ‘Jewel of the Empire’ was, as Lord Salisbury remarked in 1882, easily regarded by many British imperialists as ‘an English barrack in the Oriental Seas from which we may draw any number of troops without paying for them’. In more prosaic terms India was seen as a permanent strategic reserve and the principal means by which British interests were secured throughout Asia, from Suez to Wei-hei-wei. As such, India was a central component in the British imperial system. The empire's matchless prestige, its wealth and apparent power all stemmed in large measure from India. In the second half of the nineteenth century the Raj, the East India trade and the Indian Army demonstrated a combination of power which Britain's imperial rivals might envy but never surpass. The central importance of India is illustrated by the Victorian conception of imperial defence, which was seen to depend on the twin pillars of naval supremacy and the defence of India. The only serious military commitment which British planners admitted before the turn of the century was the possibility of meeting a Russian invasion of India across the North West Frontier. This threat existed mostly in the minds of British generals. Britain and Russia came closest to war on the Frontier at the time of the Penjdeh incident in 1885, but even then the likelihood of a Russian expedition against India was hardly more than remote. Nevertheless, the threat of invasion was the principal rationale for the nature and size of the Army in India and this consideration guided Lord Kitchener's reforms of the Indian Army during his time as Commander-in-Chief from 1902 to 1909.

In the nineteenth century, the British succeeded in deriving growing benefits from their Indian territories. With dominion firmly established, and the colonial connection beginning to take its modern shape, India came to fit less awkwardly with British economic interests. India now became Britain's best customer for her most important industry, a useful supplier of raw materials, a safe field for capital investment, a crucial element in her balance of payments and key to the multilateral system of settlements which sustained the continued expansion of her world trade.The pattern of trade and investment, which brought such signal benefits to Britain, depended upon dominion over India. Dominion had given Britain the levers of power to open up Indian markets to her trade,knock down the internal barriers to the free flow of her goods, and prevent the erection of external tariffs to protect the Indian product.Dominion enabled Britain to build, at Indian cost, a system of transport by rail and road which linked the ports, themselves the creation of British rule, to their hinterlands, and to tilt the advantage in favour ofher own nationals who dominated India's foreign trade; it helped to give British shipping, banking and insurance a virtual monopoly over the invisibles of Indian trade and it imposed upon India a currency and banking system which protected the ratio of sterling to the rupee. Butthese balance-sheets of imperialism do not reveal the full importance of the Raj to the British world system. Just as India's growing foreign tradehelped to push British influence into east and west Asia alike, so her growing military power underwrote that influence, whether formal or informal, in those regions. An oriental barracks, where half of Britain'sworld force was billeted free of charge, India was the battering ram of British power throughout the eastern arc of its expansion. Before the First World War, India seemed triumphantly to have justified the efforts of generations of empire-builders.

When the British came to power in India, it was certainly not in the face of the organized resistance of Islam. Yet the British Raj came to its end among political and social convulsions in which Hindus and Muslims cut each other's throats and large populations were shunted across the new frontiers of a sub-continent, now divided into two nations on the basis of religion. Events of such magnitude have encouraged historians to seek explanations of matching significance which may account for the growth of Muslim separatism. This article is concerned with the period of the nineteen-twenties and -thirties, before the onset of the end game when the communal quarrel burst out in deadly earnest. Explicit rival-ries between the communities tended to exist at two main levels, the level of organized politics at the top where Hindu and Muslim elites were rivals for influence with government and eventually for the control of government itself, and the level of mob violence in the streets. This article is concerned with organized politics at the top, although it does not deny the existence and importance of tensions at the base. Its main emphasis will be upon the provincial stage, in particular the Muslim majority province of the Punjab. In the period before 1919 the development of Muslim politics suggested that a specifically Muslim separatism orchestrated by the United Provinces had emerged upon the all-India stage. But the coming of the reforms reversed the situation of the preceding decades, and there was less incentive for Muslim politicians in the United Provinces to claim to be the spokesmen of Muslims in the nation.

The spectacular decline of the expatriate business houses of eastern India in this century is one of the many underdeveloped areas of Indian economic history. The extent of the decline itself seems hard to exaggerate. In 1900 almost all the commanding heights of the colonial economy appeared to the dominated by expatriate and foreign firms, most of them British. Not only was the foreign trade of Bengal almost exclusively in their hands, but so was the industrial and banking structure. In addition, most historians of the period have stressed that the expatriate sector was able to dominate internal trade, operating in amonopsony position in regard to cash crop production and marketing and also, thanks to its contacts with government, the railways and the port trusts, to enjoy hegemonic powers that impeded the development of indigenous rivals. Thus, as A. K. Bagchi has stressed, 'social discrimination was complemented and supported by political, economic, administrative and financial arrangements which afforded European businessmen a substantial and systematic advantage over their Indian rivals in India.' The fate of the expatriate groups since 1950 has beenvery different. Many suffered considerable depredations during and after the second world war, losing important sectors of their business to Indian rivals, and even being bought out entirely by native enter-prise. Such expatriate interests as survived after Independence have generally failed to perform well. Their recent history has been agloomy one of a steady erosion of profitability and viability, so that most of those that still remain are now taken seriously only by a new generation of indigenous speculators and asset strippers.

The late 1930s saw a definite turn in political developments in India. Following the abandonment of Civil Disobedience in 1934, a prolonged period of internal peace helped the Congress, until then a broadly-based movement with a general commitment to fight foreign rule, evolve into a more organized party capable of aspiring to political dominance. In the process, its relations with different social forces took a more definite shape. While in the past the Congress had clung to the myth of an Indian society free of internal conflicts and united in opposition to the British, the growth of social conflicts in town and countryside forced it to take into account the competing aspirations of various groups.

During the inter-war years there were significant developments in Indo-British economic and political relations. It is in the context of these developments that this paper will seek to study the complex relationships between the different fractions of businessmen, British and Indian, the Government of India, the Home Government and the Indian National Congress. The major theme of this paper is the attempts made in the 1930s by governments and businessmen to reorganize the economic relations between Britain and India to take account of changes wrought by the first world war, the world depression, and the ascent of Indian nationalism. One question which dominated these negotiations was the long-standing issue of duties on cotton goods imported into India. This issue served to bring into sharp focus the different views of the imperial rulers, British businessmen in India, Indian businessmen of different sorts, and nationalist politicians, on the immediate future of the economic link between Britain and India. The question of cotton duties dogged the talks on economic cooperation from the tariff negotiations of the early 1930s, through the period of the Ottawa agreement and Lees-Mody pact, to the Indo-British Trade Agreement of 1939.

Throughout the colonial period, the government played a substantial role in structuring India's foreign trade and in moulding the economy of the great port cities and their immediate hinterlands. Once Company and government had started to prise themselves apart in the early nineteenth century, however, the colonial rulers adopted a very haughty attitude towards the working of the internal economy. The development of internal production and trade would of course be deeply affected by the imperial connection, but the colonial government refused to admit responsibility and was careful not to be drawn into active intervention. The transition from colonial rule to independence did not mark a sharp break between this era of laissez faire or minimal interference in the internal economy, and an era of 'development' or constructive intervention. Indeed, it is more likely that a reluctant slide into economic management during the latter part of the colonial period helped to speed the colonial rulers along their course of retreat; any attempt to tamper with the mechanisms of the internal economy opened up the colonial government to contradictory pressures and threatened to expose many of the weaker links in the mesh of colonial command.

Between the wars, the development of a labour movement in Bombay reflected a growing polarization in social and political relations in the city. This period, which saw an intensification of social conflict, also witnessed changes in the character of industrial action. Until 1914, strikes in the cotton textile industry were largely confined to particular departments and mills; increasingly after the war, they were coordinated across the industry as a whole. Rising prices and unprecedented profits which accompanied the post-war boom led to the demand for higher wages supported by two general strikes. In the mid 1920s, as the industry's markets slumped, attempts to cut wages were once again strongly resisted. With a slight improvement in their fortunes in the later 1920s, the millowners introduced ‘rationalization’ schemes; for the workforce this meant more work, less wages and higher chances of unemployment. Between April 1928 and September 1929, two general strikes crippled the industry for about eleven months, and the extension of these schemes and a further round of wage cuts led to another strike wave in 1933-34. Apart from several one-day closures, eight general strikes occurred in the industry between 1919 and 1940. The impact of this militancy was felt not only in other occupations in Bombay but also in other industrial centres, such as Sholapur and Ahmedabad. As Bombay became the scene of militant working-class action in India, its labour movement, under communist leadership since 1928, acquired an explicitly political direction.

Perhaps the most intransigent problem in the recent history of Indian society remains an adequate understanding of the processes of social change which took place under colonialism. As the continunig controversies within, as much as between, the traditions of modernization theory, Marxism, and the underdevelopment theory make plain, the Indian historical record is peculiarly difficult to grasp with conventional sociological concepts. In the study of Western European society, a focus on the evolution of legal ideas and institutions has proved a useful entry point to social history.The law may be seen to represent a set of general principles through which political authority and the state (however constituted) attempt to legitimize the social institutions and norms of conduct which they find valuable. As such, its history reflects the struggle in society to assume, control or resist this authority. Its study should help to reveal the nature of the forces involved in the struggle and to suggest the implications for social development of the way in which, at any one time, their struggle was resolved. The condition of the law may be seen to crystallize the condition of society. This, of course, could be said of any governing institution. But where the law becomes uniquely valuable is in that, because of its social function, the struggle around it is necessarily expressed in terms of general statements of principle rather than particular statements of private and discrete interest. At the most fundamental level, these principles demarcate the rules on which the contending parties seek to build their versions of society and provide useful clues to their wider, often undisclosed, positions.