Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (The New Cambridge History of India)
C. A. Bayly | 1988-04-29 00:00:00 | Cambridge University Press | 248 | Renaissance
This volume provides a synthesis of some of the most important themes to emerge from the recent proliferation of specialized scholarship on the period of India's transition to colonialism and seeks to reassess the role of Indians in the politics and economics of early colonialism. It discusses new views of the "decline of the Mughals" and the role of the Indian capitalists in the expansion of the English East India Company's trade and urban settlements. It 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. Finally it deals with changes in India's ecology, social organization, and ideologies in the early nineteenth century, and the nature of Indian resistance to colonialism, including the Rebellion of 1857.
Reviews
This book covers the historiography of how Indian developed in the British Empire up through the Mutiny in 1857. The rise of British dominance in the Punjab as well as the surrounding countryside is broken up by category and analyzed through the relevant literature at the time. This book does a wonderful job of assessing where the debate on empire was at the end of the 1980's and while it is important to update for current literature it is still a very thorough and useful account. It looks at how the rise of a farming class gave way to the caste system that was a development of the British Raj. This is mostly an account of the pre European and early days of the East India Company that developed into the British Empire following the Mutiny. Overall this is a very useful book on how the British Empire came into formation and the effect that Indian society had on forming the crown jewel of the empire.
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