Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Maps
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 The first century of British colonial rule: social revolution or social stagnation?
- 2 Privileged land tenure in village India in the early nineteenth century
- 3 Agrarian society and the Pax Britannica in northern India in the early nineteenth century
- 4 The land revenue systems of the North-Western Provinces and Bombay Deccan 1830–80: ideology and the official mind
- 5 Traditional resistance movements and Afro-Asian nationalism: the context of the 1857 Mutiny Rebellion
- 6 Nawab Walidad Khan and the 1857 Struggle in the Bulandshahr district
- 7 Rural revolt in the Great Rebellion of 1857 in India: a study of the Saharanpur and Muzaffarnagar districts
- 8 Traditional elites in the Great Rebellion of 1857: some aspects of rural revolt in the upper and central Doab
- 9 The structure of landholding in Uttar Pradesh 1860–1948
- 10 Dynamism and enervation in North Indian agriculture: the historical dimension
- 11 Peasants, moneylenders and colonial rule: an excursion into Central India
- 12 The return of the peasant to South Asian history
- Glossary
- Index
1 - The first century of British colonial rule: social revolution or social stagnation?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Maps
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 The first century of British colonial rule: social revolution or social stagnation?
- 2 Privileged land tenure in village India in the early nineteenth century
- 3 Agrarian society and the Pax Britannica in northern India in the early nineteenth century
- 4 The land revenue systems of the North-Western Provinces and Bombay Deccan 1830–80: ideology and the official mind
- 5 Traditional resistance movements and Afro-Asian nationalism: the context of the 1857 Mutiny Rebellion
- 6 Nawab Walidad Khan and the 1857 Struggle in the Bulandshahr district
- 7 Rural revolt in the Great Rebellion of 1857 in India: a study of the Saharanpur and Muzaffarnagar districts
- 8 Traditional elites in the Great Rebellion of 1857: some aspects of rural revolt in the upper and central Doab
- 9 The structure of landholding in Uttar Pradesh 1860–1948
- 10 Dynamism and enervation in North Indian agriculture: the historical dimension
- 11 Peasants, moneylenders and colonial rule: an excursion into Central India
- 12 The return of the peasant to South Asian history
- Glossary
- Index
Summary
The science of history proceeds no doubt as the detailed criticism of sociological generalisations, but of generalisations so rudimentary and so little analysed that they constitute primitive archetypal images lurking in the background of the historian's consciousness rather than a formed system of ideas. In South Asian studies such images are the simple dichotomies of East and West, tradition and modernity, continuity and change, status and contract, feudalism and capitalism, caste and class; and the historian and social scientist conduct their increasingly technical and sophisticated studies in the form of an implicit critique of these conceptual polarities. Nineteenth-century sociological thought, with its evolutionary and therefore historical bias, founded itself squarely and unabashedly upon such polarities, but today few read James Mill, or Hegel, or Maine, or Lyall, or even, one suspects, Weber, on India. To strike the primitive images into our consciousness there was needed a synthesising mind of genius who could throw the sociological generalisations of his time into memorable epigrammatic phrase and fire them with political passion. That is one reason at least why Marx's occasional journalism on India is still read and pondered, even though his more academic studies have remained neglected until quite recently.
Marx recognised that the pre-conditions of Western conquest lay in Indian rather than in British society.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Peasant and the RajStudies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion in Colonial India, pp. 19 - 45Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1978