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Economic Depression and the Making of ‘Traditional’ Society in Colonial India 1820–1855

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

David Washbrook
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Extract

Over recent years, questions concerning the character and direction of social change in colonial India have become increasingly complex. Until the 1960s, it remained possible to conceive the coming of British rule as representing ‘the beginnings of modernisation’ and to write Indian history in terms of an ‘heroic’ struggle to fulfil the civilising mission: ‘heroic’, in the British sense, because it largely failed. Except among a narrow stratum of elites, Indian society obviously refused the West's invitation to ‘usher it into history’ and India's culture moved very little towards convergence with the West's.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 3 , December 1993 , pp. 237 - 263
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1993

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References

1 I am grateful to Burton Stein for his comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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35 Idem.

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65 See my ‘Law, State and Agrarian Society’.

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71 See Government of Madras, A Collection … Inam Settlement.

72 The first attempts at ‘popular’ nationalist mobilisation, particularly those of B. G. Tilak in Maharashtra in the 1890s, strongly emphasised the defence of ‘traditional’ social relations. See Cashman, R., The Myth of the Lokmanya (Berkeley, 1975)Google Scholar; also O'Hanlon, R., ‘Issues of Widowhood’ in Contesting Power, eds Haynes, D. and Prakash, G. (New Delhi, 1991)Google Scholar.

73 Pace R. Guha, ‘Dominance without Hegemony’.

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75 As in D. Ludden, Peasant History, ch. 6.

76 See A. Bandopadhyay, Agrarian Economy; D. Ludden, Peasant History, chs 4, 5; N. Mukherjee, Ryotwari System, ch. 10.

77 See my ‘Commercialisation of Agriculture’; also, Stein, B., ‘Does Culture make Practice Perfect?’ in All the Kings' Mana, ed. Stein, B. (Madras, 1984)Google Scholar; also Mukherjee, N., Ryotwari System, 214Google Scholar.

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85 Idem.