Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-07T10:40:40.357Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Empire, sociality, and political economy in colonial Bengal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 October 2020

Andrew Sartori*
Affiliation:
Department of History, NYU, New York, NY, USA
*
*Corresponding author: Andrew Sartori, E-mail: asartori@nyu.edu

Abstract

How to conceptualize the broad dissemination of economic concepts in colonial South Asia? This article uses an essay by a mid-nineteenth-century Bengali, Peary Chand Mittra, as a point of departure to approach this problem in South Asian historiography. In the first part, the essay locates the conditions of possibility for Mittra's political-economic analysis of Bengal's agrarian social order within an imperial and commercial space of extended interdependencies. The aim is not to explain the specificity of Mittra's politics so much as to highlight his recourse to political-economic concepts to ground his analysis. In the second part, the essay suggests that the grounding of political economy's colonial histories within histories of imperial space needs to be supplemented by closer attention to new normative impulses and aspirations emerging directly from agrarian society in the region. This second emphasis provides better grounds for grasping the depth and durability of political economy's reach into political and ethical claims across social space in the Subcontinent in the twentieth century. It thus broaches the necessity of subaltern histories of political economy.

Type
Featured Essays on the History of Political Economy in Asia and Europe
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adorno, Theodor W. (2000). Introduction to Sociology. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Alavi, Seema (ed.) (2001). The Eighteenth Century in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Ali, Tariq O. (2018). A Local History of Global Capital: Jute and Peasant Life in the Bengal Delta. Princeton: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ambirajan, S. (1978). Classical Political Economy and British Policy in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
[Anonymous] (1812). Free Trade to India: Letters Addressed to the Merchants and Inhabitants of the Town of Liverpool, Concerning a Free Trade to the East Indies. Liverpool: E. Smith and Co.Google Scholar
Banaji, Jairus (1977). “Capitalist Domination and the Small Peasantry: Deccan Districts I the Late Nineteenth Century.” Economic and Political Weekly 12, pp. 3334, 1375–1404.Google Scholar
Barber, William J. (1975). British Economic Thought and India, 1600–1858: A Study in the History of Development Economics. Oxford: Clarendon.Google Scholar
Bayly, C. A. (2007). “Rammohan Roy and the Advent of Constitutional Liberalism in India, 1800–1830.” Modern Intellectual History 4:1, pp. 2541.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brenner, Robert (2003). Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London's Overseas Traders, 1550–1653. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Chakrabarti, Upal (2020). Assembling the Local: Political Economy and Agrarian Governance in British India. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press (forthcoming).Google Scholar
Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2000). Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Chibber, Vivek (2013). Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Dasgupta, Ajit (1993). A History of Indian Economic Thought. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Datta, Rajat (2000). Society, Economy, and the Market: Commercialization in Rural Bengal, c. 1760–1800. New Delhi: Manohar.Google Scholar
Goswami, Manu (2004). Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Govind, Rahul (April 2011). “Revenue, Rent…profit? Early British Imperialism, Political Economy and the Search for a Differentia Specifica (Inter Se).” The Indian Economic & Social History Review 48:2, pp. 177213.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guha, Ranajit (1996 [1963]). A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Hodgson, Geoffrey M. (2001). How Economics Forgot History: The Problem of Historical Specificity in Social Science. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hont, Istvan (2005). Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.Google Scholar
Hundert, E. J. (1994). The Enlightenment's Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, Gareth Stedman (1983). Languages of Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Karak, Anirban (2020). “What Was ‘Indian’ Political Economy? On the Separation of the ‘Social,’ the ‘Economic’ and the ‘Ethical’ in Indian Nationalist Thought, 1892–1948.” Modern Asian Studies, FirstView. doi: 10.1017/S0026749X19000118.Google Scholar
Leonard, Spencer (2014). “‘A Theater of Disputes’: The East India Company Election of 1764 as the Founding of British India.” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 42:4, pp. 593624.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maine, Henry Sumner (1871). Village-Communities in the East and West. London: John Murray.Google Scholar
Marshall, P. J. (ed.) (2003). The Eighteenth Century in Indian History: Evolution or Revolution?. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Mill, John Stuart (1920). Principles of Political Economy. London: Longmans Green.Google Scholar
Mittra, Peary Chand (1846). “The Zemindar and the Ryot.” Calcutta Review 6:12, pp. 305–53.Google Scholar
Mukherjee, Tilottama (2011). “Markets in Eighteenth Century Bengal Economy.” The Indian Economic and Social History Review 48:2, pp. 143176.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
[Parliament, Great Britain] (1861). Parliamentary Papers. London: Stationery Office.Google Scholar
Parthasarathi, Prasannan (2011). Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Patnaik, Utsa (1991). Agrarian Relations and Accumulation: The “Mode of Production” Debate in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Perlin, Frank (1983). “Proto Industrialization and Pre-Colonial South Asia.” Past and Present 98, pp. 3095.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pincus, Steve (2009). 1688: The First Modern Revolution. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Sarkar, Sumit (2019). “The Complexities of Young Bengal.” In Essays of a Lifetime: Reformers, Nationalists, Subalterns, pp. 2552. Delhi: Permanent Black.Google Scholar
Sartori, Andrew (2008). Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sartori, Andrew (2013). “Global Intellectual History and the History of Political Economy.” In Global Intellectual History, ed. Samuel, Moyn and Andrew, Sartori, pp. 110–33. New York: Columbia University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sartori, Andrew (2014). Liberalism in Empire: An Alternative History. Oakland: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Sartori, Andrew (2016). “From Statecraft to Social Science in Early Modern English Political Economy.” Critical Historical Studies 3:2, pp. 181214.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sartori, Andrew (2019). “The Labor Question and Political Thought in Colonial Bengal.” In Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory, ed. Jenco, Leigh K., Idris, Murad and Thomas, Megan C., pp. 307–26. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Sartori, Andrew (2020a). “Property and Political Norms: Hanafi Juristic Discourse in Agrarian Bengal.” Modern Intellectual History 17:2, pp. 471–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sartori, Andrew (2020b) “Genealogy, Critical Theory, History.” Critical Historical Studies 7:1, pp. 6374.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Semmel, Bernard (1970). The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism: Classical Political Economy, the Empire of Free Trade, and Imperialism, 1750–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sen, Sudipta (1998). Empire of Free Trade: The East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Sewell, William H. Jr. (1994). A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Sieyes and What is the Third Estate?. Durham: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sewell, William H. Jr. (2005). Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sturman, Rachel (2012). The Government of Social Life in Colonial India: Liberalism, Religious Law, and Women's Rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thompson, George and Robert, J. (1836). Breckinridge. Discussion on American Slavery. Boston: Knapp.Google Scholar
Travers, Robert (2009). “British India as a Problem in Political Economy: Comparing James Steuart and Adam Smith,” In Lineages of Empire: The Historical Roots of British Imperial Thought, ed. Duncan, Kelly. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy.Google Scholar
Vaughn, James (2019). The Politics of Empire at the Accession of George III: The East India Company and the Crisis and Transformation of Britain's Imperial State, pp. 137–60. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Wilson, Jon E. (2008). The Domination of Strangers: Modern Governance in Eastern India, 1780–1835. Basingstoke: Palgrave.CrossRefGoogle Scholar