The Formation of the Colonial State in India

The Formation of the Colonial State in India PDF Author: Hayden J. Bellenoit
Publisher: Routledge Studies in South Asian History
ISBN: 9781138347571
Category : India
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
In the period between the 1770s and 1840s, through the process of colonial state formation, the early colonial state in India was able to harness and extract vast amounts of agrarian wealth in north India. However, little is known of the histories of the Indian scribes and the role they played in shaping the early patterns of British colonial rule. This book offers a new way of interpreting the colonial state's origins in north India. It examines how the formation of early agrarian revenue settlements exacerbated an extant late Mughal taxation tradition, and how the success of British power was shaped by this extant paper-oriented revenue culture. It goes on to examine how the service and cultural histories of various Hindu scribal communities fit within broader changes in political administration, taxation, patterns of governance and a shared Indo-Islamic administrative culture. The author argues that British power after the late eighteenth century came as much through bureaucratic mastery, paper and taxes as it did through military force and commercial ruthlessness. The book draws upon private family papers, interviews and Persian sources to demonstrate how the fortunes of scribes changed between empires, and the important role they played at the height of the British Raj by 1900. Offering a detailed account of how agrarian wealth provided the bedrock of the colonial state's later patterns of administration, this book is a unique and refreshing contribution to studies in South Asian History, Governance and Imperialism.

The Formation of the Colonial State in India

The Formation of the Colonial State in India PDF Author: Hayden J. Bellenoit
Publisher: Routledge Studies in South Asian History
ISBN: 9781138347571
Category : India
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the period between the 1770s and 1840s, through the process of colonial state formation, the early colonial state in India was able to harness and extract vast amounts of agrarian wealth in north India. However, little is known of the histories of the Indian scribes and the role they played in shaping the early patterns of British colonial rule. This book offers a new way of interpreting the colonial state's origins in north India. It examines how the formation of early agrarian revenue settlements exacerbated an extant late Mughal taxation tradition, and how the success of British power was shaped by this extant paper-oriented revenue culture. It goes on to examine how the service and cultural histories of various Hindu scribal communities fit within broader changes in political administration, taxation, patterns of governance and a shared Indo-Islamic administrative culture. The author argues that British power after the late eighteenth century came as much through bureaucratic mastery, paper and taxes as it did through military force and commercial ruthlessness. The book draws upon private family papers, interviews and Persian sources to demonstrate how the fortunes of scribes changed between empires, and the important role they played at the height of the British Raj by 1900. Offering a detailed account of how agrarian wealth provided the bedrock of the colonial state's later patterns of administration, this book is a unique and refreshing contribution to studies in South Asian History, Governance and Imperialism.

Fiscal Capacity and the Colonial State in Asia and Africa, c. 1850-1960

Fiscal Capacity and the Colonial State in Asia and Africa, c. 1850-1960 PDF Author: Ewout Frankema
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108494269
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
How colonial governments in Asia and Africa financed their activities and why fiscal systems varied across colonies reveals the nature and long-term effects of colonial rule.

Indian Migration and Empire

Indian Migration and Empire PDF Author: Radhika Mongia
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822372118
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
How did states come to monopolize control over migration? What do the processes that produced this monopoly tell us about the modern state? In Indian Migration and Empire Radhika Mongia provocatively argues that the formation of colonial migration regulations was dependent upon, accompanied by, and generative of profound changes in normative conceptions of the modern state. Focused on state regulation of colonial Indian migration between 1834 and 1917, Mongia illuminates the genesis of central techniques of migration control. She shows how important elements of current migration regimes, including the notion of state sovereignty as embodying the authority to control migration, the distinction between free and forced migration, the emergence of passports, the formation of migration bureaucracies, and the incorporation of kinship relations into migration logics, are the product of complex debates that attended colonial migrations. By charting how state control of migration was critical to the transformation of a world dominated by empire-states into a world dominated by nation-states, Mongia challenges positions that posit a stark distinction between the colonial state and the modern state to trace aspects of their entanglements.

Document Raj

Document Raj PDF Author: Bhavani Raman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226703274
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Historians of British colonial rule in India have noted both the place of military might and the imposition of new cultural categories in the making of Empire, but Bhavani Raman, in Document Raj, uncovers a lesser-known story of power: the power of bureaucracy. Drawing on extensive archival research in the files of the East India Company’s administrative offices in Madras, she tells the story of a bureaucracy gone awry in a fever of documentation practices that grew ever more abstract—and the power, both economic and cultural, this created. In order to assert its legitimacy and value within the British Empire, the East India Company was diligent about record keeping. Raman shows, however, that the sheer volume of their document production allowed colonial managers to subtly but substantively manipulate records for their own ends, increasingly drawing the real and the recorded further apart. While this administrative sleight of hand increased the company’s reach and power within the Empire, it also bolstered profoundly new orientations to language, writing, memory, and pedagogy for the officers and Indian subordinates involved. Immersed in a subterranean world of delinquent scribes, translators, village accountants, and entrepreneurial fixers, Document Raj maps the shifting boundaries of the legible and illegible, the legal and illegitimate, that would usher India into the modern world.

Contagion and Enclaves

Contagion and Enclaves PDF Author: Nandini Bhattacharya
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1846318297
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Contagion and Enclaves examines the social history of medicine across two intersecting British enclaves in the major tea-producing region of colonial India: the hill station of Darjeeling and the adjacent tea plantations of North Bengal. Focusing on the establishment of hill sanatoria and other health care facilities and practices against the backdrop of the expansion of tea cultivation and labor migration, it tracks the demographic and environmental transformation of the region and the critical role race and medicine played in it, showing that the British enclaves were essential and distinctive sites of the articulation of colonial power and economy.

Law and the Economy in Colonial India

Law and the Economy in Colonial India PDF Author: Tirthankar Roy
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022638764X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
By accessibly recounting and analyzing the unique experience of institutions in colonial Indiawhich were influenced heavily by both British Common Law and indigenous Indian practices and traditionsLaw and the Economy in Colonial India sheds new light on what exactly fosters the types of institutions that have been key to economic development throughout world history more generally. The culmination and years of research, the book goes through a range of examples, including textiles, opium, tea, indigo, tenancy, credit, and land mortgage, to show how economic laws in colonial India were shaped neither by imported European ideas about how colonies should be ruled nor indigenous institutions, but by the practice of producing and trading. The book is an essential addition to Indian history and to some of the most fundamental questions in economic history."

The Study of the State

The Study of the State PDF Author: Henri J. Claessen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110825791
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 553

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Book Description
The Study of the State.

Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire

Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire PDF Author: C. A. Bayly
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781139053501
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
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.

A New Economic History of Colonial India

A New Economic History of Colonial India PDF Author: Latika Chaudhary
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317674332
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
A New Economic History of Colonial India provides a new perspective on Indian economic history. Using economic theory and quantitative methods, it shows how the discipline is being redefined and how new scholarship on India is beginning to embrace and make use of concepts from the larger field of global economic history and economics. The book discusses the impact of property rights, the standard of living, the labour market and the aftermath of the Partition. It also addresses how education and work changed, and provides a rethinking of traditional topics including de-industrialization, industrialization, railways, balance of payments, and the East India Company. Written in an accessible way, the contributors – all leading experts in their fields – firmly place Indian history in the context of world history. An up-to-date critical survey and novel resource on Indian Economic History, this book will be useful for undergraduate and postgraduate courses on Economic History, Indian and South Asian Studies, Economics and Comparative and Global History.

Colonial Institutions and Civil War

Colonial Institutions and Civil War PDF Author: Shivaji Mukherjee
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108844995
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
Shows how colonial indirect rule and land tenure institutions create state weakness, ethnic inequality and insurgency in India, and around the world.