Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire

Year 1990

ISBN No. 9780521386500

No.of pages 248

Subject Knowledge and Society, Social Science

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The past twenty years have seen a proliferation of specialist scholarship on the period of India's trasition 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.

Table of contents

List of maps; General editor's preface; Preface; Introduction; 1. India in the eighteenth century: the formation of states and social groups; 2. Indian capital and the emergence of colonial society; 3. The crisis of the Indian state, 1780-1820; 4. The consolidation and failure of the East India Company's state, 1818-57; 5. Peasant and Brahmin: consolidating 'traditional' society; 6. Rebellion and reconstruction; Conclusion: the first age of colonialism in India; Glossary of Indian terms; Bibliography; Index.