Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire

by C. A. Bayly

• ISBN13: 9780521250924
• ISBN10: 0521250927
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1988-04-29
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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	vi
General editor's preface	vii
Preface	ix
Introduction	1	(6)
India in the eighteenth century. The formation of states and social groups	7	(38)
Indian capital and the emergence of colonial society	45	(34)
The crisis of the Indian state, 1780--1820	79	(27)
The consolidation and failure of the East India Company's state, 1818--57	106	(30)
Peasant and Brahmin: consolidating `traditional' society	136	(33)
Rebellion and reconstruction	169	(31)
Conclusion. The first age of colonialism in India	200	(7)
Glossary of Indian terms	207	(5)
Bibliographical essay	212	(12)
Index	224