SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Conditions in India, and the colonial impact upon them, have been a ground base to the main themes of the previous chapters. They now must make their own contribution, by means of a consideration of the history of agrarian structure in Bihar from the eighteenth century. The starting-point is made appropriate by the permanent settlement, but called into question by recent refinements of ideas about India before British rule. Partly the product of renewed empirical research, and partly an exercise in demystification, these serve to illustrate how unformed the parameters of modern Indian history still are, how narrow the consensus. They re-examine not just the cruder assertions about Indian backwardness or decadence, but also those old orthodoxies in the more subtle forms in which they persist today. What was the trajectory of the Indian political economy in the colonial period? A range of possibilities is now being suggested: that no radical break with the past accompanied the advent of British rule (fitting. with a tendency altogether to play down British impact), that India had been incorporated within or at least influenced by broader economic and political systems long before the nineteenth century, and that situations and reactions differed markedly between regions over the period.