eighteenth-century issues in south asia

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Review: Eighteenth-Century Issues in South Asia Author(s): D. A. Washbrook Review by: D. A. Washbrook Source: Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 44, No. 3 (2001), pp.

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EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ISSUES IN SOUTH ASIA

D.A. WASHBROOK* A Review Article of:

Sushil CHAUDHURY, From Prosperity to Decline: Eighteenth-Century Bengal. Delhi: Manohar, 1995. Pp. xvi + 377. Rs 500. ISBN 81-7304-105-9. Om PRAKASH, European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-colonial India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. Xviii + 377. ?60. ISBN 0521-257581. Sudipta SEN, Empire of Free Trade: the East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. Pp. 225. US$ 37.50. ISBN 0-8122-3426-X. Lakshmi SUBRAMANIAN, Indigenous Capital and Imperial Expansion: Bombay, Surat and the West Coast. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. viii + 368. Rs 495. ISBN 0-19-563559-0. Matthew H. EDNEY, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1997. Pp. xv + 458. US$ 35. ISBN 0-226-18487-0. Michael H. FISHER (ed.), The Travels of Dean Mahomet. An Eighteenth-Century Journey through India. California: University of California Press, 1997. Hb. US$ 45. Pb. US$ 16.95. ISBN 0-520-20716-5.

Until relatively recently, the eighteenth century was one of the most neglected periods in the history of South Asia. Sandwiched between the high points of Mughal imperial splendour in the seventeenth century and British imperial might in the nineteenth, it was widely dismissed as an epoch of decay, chaos, greed and violence. However, in the last couple of decades, it has started to undergo a serious re-appraisal. It was during the eighteenth century that what might be termed the point of gravity in global history shifted decisively from East to West, from Asia to Western Europe and North America. Moreover, events that took place in South Asia were critical to this shift: the rise of the English East India Company to dominance in Mughal India represented the first instance of the European 'conquest' of a major Asian power and also provided a platform-of men, money and materielle-for the subjugation of the entire region from the eastern Mediterranean to the South China Sea. Understand- ing what happened in India in the eighteenth century has become central to

* Dr. D.A. Washbrook, St. Antony's College, Oxford University, 62 Woodstock Rd., Oxford, OX2 6JF, England, [email protected].

? Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2001 JESHO 44,3


EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ISSUES IN SOUTH ASIA 373

understanding the subsequent history of the Western-dominated world and, relat- edly, the processes of capitalism and modernity, which that history released.

All the books gathered here explore, in one way or another, South Asia's eighteenth century and the interactions between Europeans and Indians, which it contained. But they do so from markedly different perspectives and reflect the continuing controversies surrounding the subject. A first such controversy concerns the impact of the European trading companies on the South Asian economy. As is well-known, until the mid-eighteenth century South Asia possessed a very wealthy economy (or perhaps series of regional economies) cen- tred on textile manufacturing-but, then, what happened? The terrain of debate is neatly laid out between Sushil Chaudhury's From Prosperity to Decline: Eighteenth-Century Bengal and Om Prakash's European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-colonial India, which reprise and extend arguments that the authors have already deployed in 'combat' against each other in the pages of specialist historical journals.' Chaudhury takes a stark view of the impact of European trade and emergent political power: he contrasts a situation of high commercial prosperity, based mainly on inland trade, in Bengal in the first half of the eighteenth century with one of famine, depradation and decline in the second half, as the East India Company seized power and sought to annex the local economy to its sea-borne interests. Prakash offers a less dramatic, but also more complex, thesis. Previously, he has argued that European sea-borne trade from the later seventeenth century was of positive benefit to the Bengal economy, stimulating a period of growth.2 Here, he broadens his perspective to attempt an assessment of the European impact across the whole of South Asia from the early sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries. He carefully weighs costs against benefits: off-setting the loss of control over shipping and long distance sea routes against the advantage of new markets and increased sources of specie. While recognising that the acquisition of monopoly powers by the European companies, as a result of their late eighteenth-century state-building activities, created problems, he remains inclined to take an optimistic view. By implica- tion, he dates the full 'colonial' subordination of the South Asian to the Euro- pean economy to the nineteenth century, not earlier.

The debate between Chaudhury and Prakash touches a wide range of issues. Perhaps the least tractable of them concerns the status of the data on which they base their assessments. Here, it is interesting that both should see at least the first half of the eighteenth century in Bengal as marked by prosperity and

Sushil Chaudhury, 'European Companies'; Om Prakash, 'On Estimating the Employment Implications'.

2 Om Prakash, The Dutch East India Company.


374 D.A. WASHBROOK

growth. This stands in sharp contrast to the general perspective on the epoch advanced by Irfan Habib, which takes economic decline to have become established much earlier, with the waning of Mughal imperial power.3 Chaudhury and Prakash add important support to the 'revisionist' interpretations associated with Christopher Bayly, Andre Wink and Muzaffar Alam, who see Mughal political decline in the context of secular economic growth.4 With regard to the second half of the century, however, Chaudhury's argument is seriously questioned by the more recent researches of Rajat Datta. In examining the commercialisation of Bengal, Datta casts doubt on the accuracy of data supplied by contemporary Company officials, who had an interest in maximising the appearance of economic decline, not least to reduce the levels of revenue which they were required to remit to their superiors in Calcutta. Chaudhury's case rests very heavily on the uncritical use of this same data. In contrast, Datta surmises that, while episodes such as the famine of 1770 and increased pressure of revenue extraction may have slowed growth in the last decades of the eighteenth century, contemporary images of mass immiseration were greatly exaggerated.5

In many ways, it is supremely ironic that Chaudhury's argument should fall a victim of 'false' propaganda by Company officials because it is plainly meant as a root-and-branch denunciation of colonialism, and fits into a venerable his- toriographical tradition reaching back to Alexander Dow's first History of Hindostan, which critiqued the rapacity of the Company, and Dadhabhai Naoroji's Un- British India, which signalled the beginnings of the Indian nationalist struggle against British rule. It would be difficult to deny the realities of colonial domination in the nineteenth century: of the subordination and exploitation of an 'Indian' by a 'British' economy. Equally, by this era, the categories 'Indian' and 'British' were clearly defined and sharply juxtaposed in almost every walk of social life. However, in considering the eighteenth century there is a dan- ger-ever present in historical interpretation-that the shadow of subsequent events will serve to obscure the nature of antecedent conditions.

Several of the key debates on this era turn, in effect, on how far the categories of nineteenth-century colonialism and nationalism can be read back into the events bringing the Europeans to power a hundred years earlier. Were 'Indian' and 'European' interests always juxtaposed? Did the conquest take place through the impact of a superior exogenous force-wholly formed and fashioned outside South Asia-on a pristine, indigenous (and proto-national)

Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India. 4 C.A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars; Andre Wink, Land and Sovereignty in India;

Muzaffar Alam, The Crisis of Empire. 5 Rajat Datta, Society, Economy and the Market.



culture? Or were, at this time, Indian and European interests and identities deeply entangled and did the 'conquest'-if it can be so-called-take place because of cleavages and conflicts within a common South Asian polity (or perhaps, more properly, a Eur-Asian one)? These questions also carry corollaries which are of special relevance for South Asia's place in world history: was the conquest merely the first manifestation of an innate 'superiority,' which destined Europe for subsequent global domination; or was the conquest a contingent phenomenon and, itself, strategically crucial to enabling this domination subsequently to arise? How far was the structuring of juxtaposed 'Indian' and 'British' identities and interests a consequence of the conquest rather than its cause?

Chaudhury takes a strong position, reading the eighteenth century in terms of oppositional Indian and European (national/colonial) categories, which he extends even to a dichotomy between inland and sea-borne commerce. But his case may run into severe difficulties. On the one hand, in the light of Om Prakash's earlier work, is it meaningful to hold inland and sea-borne commerce so clearly apart? Prakash shows, for example, how the European demand for textiles in Bengal stimulated a demand for raw cotton, which started to be brought overland from as far away as Gujarat, on the other side of the sub-continent. Also, the work of Jos Gommans has indicated that a very large part of the specie metal brought to India by trade with the Europeans may have been expended in buying war-horses brought overland from Central Asia.6 The dis- tinction between inland (domestic) and sea-borne (colonial) economies is hard to sustain in the eighteenth-century context when, as K.N. Chaudhuri has argued, different regional economies in South Asia may better be conceived as parts of at least three 'circuits of trade and civilization' linking them, variously, to South- East Asia, West Asia and Arabia, the Levant and Europe.7

Equally, Chaudhury's position makes it extremely difficult to understand how the European 'conquest' can have happened at all. It has long been a sore-point for nationalist historians of Bengal that the standard accounts of the Company's rise make it the beneficiary of an internal coup in which key Hindu Bengali bankers and financiers switched their political allegiance from Muslim Nawabs to the English Company.8 Chaudhury denies that this took place: or rather that the switch was performed by any more than a single family, the famous Jagath Seth, who subsequently paid heavily for their 'treason.' But, if not with the help of Bengali bankers, how exactly did the Company come to power in this society-where its officials were extraordinarily few in number, lacking in capital

6 Jos Gommans, The Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire. 7 K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation. 8 Abdul Majed Khan, The Transition in Bengal; P.J. Marshall, Bengal.


376 D.A. WASHBROOK

and possessed of only the most limited technological advantages? Moreover, how should we understand subsequent developments, such as the displacement of the Nawabi capitals of Dacca and Murshidabad with very Anglo-Hindu cen- tre of Calcutta and the Permanent Settlement of 1793, by which the English gave landlord rights to a Bengali Hindu commercial 'gentry'? Chaudhury may exculpate his fellow Bengalis from 'complicity' in colonialism, but at full cost to historical explanation. He also may have omitted to mention two key facts: first that, as the Jagath Seth are estimated to have held about two-thirds of the Nawab's revenues, the Company did not really need the defection of any other state bankers; and second, that, as it largely functioned as a shell for the 'private' trade interests of its officials, what mattered was much less the institu- tional relationship between the Company and state bankers than that between its individual officials and their own Bengali commercial agents-and we have copious evidence of the scope of these.9

A more plausible account of the transition to Company rule is provided in Lakshmi Subramanian's Indigenous Capital and Imperial Expansion, albeit for Western India and for a slightly later period. Subramanian makes critical the way in which Indian banking groups, who previously had financed the states of the Maratha Empire, came to direct their support towards the East India Company. The reasons why they did so may certainly have reflected aspects of European 'superiority'-but in specific and limited areas. In particular, the Company's domination of the sea and its policies protecting 'capital' (including its own) from political confiscation were important in an era of declining over- seas trade opportunities (caused by disturbances in West Asia) and vagarious military fiscalism. But such 'superiorities'-or advantages-on their own could scarcely have given the Europeans power over the Western Indian hinter- land. Rather, it was Indian financial agency which combined with them and drew them forward. The Company's initial empire in the west was very much an Anglo-Indian affair, created by shared interests in advancing the dominance of capital over trade and production. In Subramanian's perspective, the eighteenth century is best seen in terms of a history of capitalism, which was as yet cross-cultural and multi-national: clearer categories of colonial domination and nationalist resistance were to emerge only later.

By contrast, Sudipta Sen's Empire of Free Trade would seem to suggest that they had emerged in India rather before most historians would regard them as having done so in Europe or anywhere else in the world. Sen returns to Chaudhury's context of eighteenth-century Bengal but views it from a very

9 P.J. Marshall, East India Fortunes.



different angle. He claims to be interested in the economy-or rather 'the market'-not in terms of its materiality but rather as 'idea.' In essence, he contrasts a discourse of 'the market' taken from the commentaries of pre-colonial Nawabi officials with one taken from those of Company officials in the years shortly after the Company disposed of Nawabi rule (1765). What he finds might most easily be seen as representing a Polanyi-esque contrast between a view of the market as 'embedded' in social and political relations and one which seeks to liberate it from such encumbrances in the name of 'free trade.' On this basis, he claims to see the transition to Company rule in Bengal as marking a true 'colonial conquest,' defined by relations of cultural difference and domination. His perception of relations of difference and domination are also extended to the mechanisms of the transition itself: where he supports Chaudhury's case that Bengali bankers, other than the invidious Jagath Seth, were in no way involved. But, once again, he fails to consider the issue of 'private' trade.

Sen's argument (like Chaudhury's) is most valuable for pointing to the vibrancy of the Bengali economy in the first half of the eighteenth century: where his evidence raises important questions for contemporary neo-classical economic theorists about any necessary relationship between free trade and commercial prosperity. Also, such theorists will be obliged to take note-if living through the Reagan and Thatcher years had not suggested it already-of the connection he makes between 'free trade' and the elaboration of state coer- cive force to guarantee 'freedom.' However, the very contemporary nature of his allusions indicates potential heuristic difficulties and dangers of reading subsequent outcomes into antecedent events. In the end, his book perhaps serves most to raise questions about the methodological status of discourse analysis and the possibilities of writing history in the 'post-colonial' United States (where it was published).

To begin, the complete disconnection between 'idea' and materiality makes it very difficult to assess the practical implications of Sen's thesis. His bibliography contains virtually no references to the economic and political historiography of Bengal. But in this historiography, the prosperity of Nawabi Bengal is widely attributed to the new centralising policies of Nawab Murshid Quli Khan,'0 which anticipated those of the Company, and to the positive impact of European commerce. How, then, can the Nawabi market-place be set up as a completely different (stereo-) type in juxtaposition to that of the Company period, which also was the product of the same politico-economic forces? Moreover, in terms of market foundations and practices, did the difference

to For these policies, see Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Mughal State.


378 D.A. WASHBROOK

matter? Sen points to the proliferation of market foundations in the Nawabi period at the behest of local powers. His emphasis on a Company discourse aimed at declaring such local foundations illegitimate would suggest that Company rule put an end to this process. But he produces no evidence to show that it did and, curiously, even concedes that what evidence he has indicates that more local markets were founded under the Company than ever before. In terms of the 'material' history of Bengal, it is quite unclear what the significance of his case can be.

No doubt, it is meant to relate to the quality of the ideas expressed by his commentators. But here, further difficulties arise over selectivity and context. The only conception of the pre-colonial market that Sen offers us, is that from Nawabi nobles who might be expected to have taken a jaundiced view of the Company, which was displacing them. But what of other groups in society, particularly the merchants and bankers who were associated with Company officials? Not only do we hear nothing from them but, in a curious aside redo- lent of anthropological notions of 'tradition,' he tells that he has no evidence of anybody in Nawabi society holding different views: Nawabi society is presented as culturally homogenous and without internal social conflict. How- ever, it has to be asked how far he can have looked for counter-evidence. In her wider investigation of many of the same Nawabi sources, Kumkum Chatterjee found evidence of both cultural and social tensions and of attempts by the Nawabi nobility to cross cultural 'frontiers' and establish dialogues with the Company's officials. She notes, in particular, how Nawabi discourse tended to put the Company and the Hindu merchant-banker in the same (despised) bracket; and also how nobles and officials were engaged in a complex discussions not of 'the market,' but over the historical nature of the state."

These discussions focused on the issue of 'the Mogul Constitution,' which dominates the Company discourse of this period far more obviously than does any concern with the marketplace.12 Sen's isolation of the market as an issue of discourse reflects his own sense of significance of issues much more than that of the historical actors; and he appears to turn it into an issue at all mainly by stringing together random sets of remarks without taking due note of their strategic context. What Company officials were most clearly concerned to do was to take back under central control powers over local markets, which they believed had been usurped from the Mughal state by local notables. They wanted to concentrate power over markets in their own hands (in most cases, under their own monopoly) rather than to 'free' them to the world. Talk of 'free

" Kumkum Chatterjee, Merchants, Politics and Society. -

T.R. Travers, 'Notions of Contested Sovereignty.'



trade' rarely lasted when questions concerning the trading rights of the French and Dutch were raised; or those of rival 'private' merchants in areas of central interest, such as the cloth trade.

Sen's interpretation appears guilty of startling anachronism. Indeed, the idea that the English East India Company of the 1760s-1780s-a Crown chartered monopoly corporation-was driven by an ideology of free trade would certainly have startled Adam Smith, whose savage critique of its practices suggests a very different position." Elsewhere, Sen insistently treats 'the Georgian State' as if it were already a species of modern state, which runs directly counter to the bulk of recent research on it.'4 While pressures to reform 'old corruption' were no doubt increasing, it was to be another generation before the slave trade was abolished, another two before the first (tepid) Reform Act was passed and, according to Cain and Hopkins, another three before 'free trade' was fully established even in Britain. Equally, by focusing on its 'official' discourse, Sen implicitly treats the Company as if it were some kind of modem business corporation and, as in the case of Chaudhury, misses its significance as a cover for private interests and franchises.

Sen's extraordinary portrait of the 'free-trading' Company is clearly meant as a piece with Ranajit Guha's A Rule of Property for Bengal, which was written forty years ago and (interestingly) has just been re-issued in the United States. It attempts to view the spread of global capitalism in terms of the imposition of a modernist, Western ideology on Bengal. The significance of the conquest of Bengal for the future of global capitalism can readily be accepted. But whether that significance lay in the imposition of ideas, which few eighteenth- century Britons can be thought to have possessed yet, is altogether another matter. If the key debates about 'the Mogul Constitution' are examined, they point much less forward to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century world of indus- trial capitalism than backwards to the political struggles of the seventeenth century: their principal referent is the 'Anglo-Saxon Constitution' which defended principles of liberty and, above all, rights to property."5

If contemporary understandings of these rights are explored, it has to be asked whether eighteenth-century Britons did not actually share the view of Nawabi noblemen that they were deeply 'embedded' in social and political relations-if not necessarily exactly the same relations. If Sen had followed through his investigation of the 'market' to consider how it was treated as 'property,'

'~ Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations. '" E.g., Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People. '5 Travers, 'Notions.'


380 D.A. WASHBROOK

he might have been given cause to re-consider the incipient modernity of the Company's discourse. When the Company came around to confiscating the rights to levy market fees and tolls previously enjoyed by local notables, it offered compensation in lieu. This was in spite of the fact that it also claimed that such fees and tolls had been levied 'illegally' and without the authority of the Mughal state, whose powers it imagined itself to be recovering. But it also held that, having levied them over time and in practice, local notables had come to establish a valid customary property right in them, which had to be respected. The rule of property (and the market) offered to Bengal in this period was based on ideas of customary and common law-very far, indeed, from the twentieth- century capitalist prescriptions read into the context by Sen and Guha.'6

The last two books gathered here also suggest how far they may have been engaged in a teleological exercise, foreshortening history and emphasising cultural differences and distinctions which as yet barely existed. Michael Fisher edits an edition of The Travels of Dean Mahomet, which must go some way to reducing propositions about the 'incommensurability' of European and In- dian cultures in the eighteenth century. Dean Mahomet was, or claimed to be, an Indian boy who attached himself to a British officer, travelled the sub- continent with him and followed him back to Britain. Later, he established himself in Ireland as a surgeon-barber, married an Irishwoman and became a minor celebrity on the fringes of fashionable society. Fisher's introduction neatly places the context of Dean Mahomet's adventures although it might have dwelled a little more on the question of who, actually, wrote his book and whether it constitutes fiction more than biography. But the text is of special interest to students of eighteenth-century Indian society and British 'manners,' where it supplies copious material for considering the complexity of relations between gender, racial, class and regional identities. Whatever else, Dean Mahomet did not live in a world where eastern and western cultures existed in different, hermetically-sealed spheres.

The second book relevant to this context is Matthew Edney's Mapping An Empire-although, ostensibly, it might have been supposed (and might even be read) to support Sen's (and Guha's) thesis. Edney examines that definitive Enlightenment project, indicative of the new 'scientific' culture of eighteenth- century Europe: the project to survey and map 'India.' He dwells heavily on the ideology of the project, with its implied connection between definition, posses- sion and control, and properly relates it to later nineteenth-century theories of imperialism and nationalism. But the way in which he relates it is quite

16 Jon Wilson, 'Governing Property.'



different from Sen. It is not the existence of traces of this ideology in the eighteenth century, which particularly draws his attention. Judging by the length of time it took to 'map' the sub-continent, the bizarre amateurism of the early pro- cedures and the parsimony of the Company with regard to the entire project, it did not represent an enterprise to which the Company's officials at the time gave prime significance. Nor does he represent the maps as effective instru- ments making possible the original 'conquest.' Indeed, he dwells delightfully on the bitter quarrels between surveyors on appropriate techniques and on local forces of resistance, which frequently rendered the cartographical results inac- curate, if not absurd. Rather, the greatest significance he sees to lie in the consequences of the maps, whatever their scientific worth, after they had been produced. On the basis of the clearly defined pictures of a territorial 'India,' which they created, all manner of imaginings of imperial power and incipient nation-hood could arise. History was changed by the fact of the map's comple- tion far more than by the intellectually eccentric decision to undertake it in the first place-and changed in ways of which the first map-makers of the eighteenth century could have had very little inkling.

The European 'conquest' of India was a remarkable event. There were very few Europeans, they possessed very limited technological advantages over Indians and they shared much in common with Indian elites, among whom they had already lived for nearly three hundred years. It is hard to explain 'the conquest' plausibly in ways which do not see it as a function of re-alignments within an Indian polity at least as much as of the expansion of a Europe power, which at this time was largely confined to the sea. But, on the basis of the conquest, all came to change. The sea-borne British now had a platform of land- based military power (the first occasion since the Roman Empire when a single power enjoyed dominance at sea and on land), which they used to overawe the world, to create markets for their industrialising economy and to 'imagine' the superiority of their civilization. The conquest of India was a key historical event, but much less because it demonstrated how a culture-supposedly aris- ing uniquely within Europe-could transform the world than how transforma- tions within the world could create the context for the emergence of European cultural (and political) dominance.

In his celebrated Orientalism, Edward Said drew attention to the way in which European imperialism had constructed a 'scientific' history based on the assumption of essential European 'difference' and 'superiority,' and he called for new, non-Eurocentric understandings of the past. It is difficult to see how those understandings can emerge if history is read backwards to impute cultural differences and distinctive ideologies, characteristic of the height of European imperialism, to prior historical contexts--even if the notion of 'superiority' is


382 D.A. WASHBROOK

(post-colonially) inverted to imply maliciousness. The essentialist categories of difference remain. If progress is to be made in meeting Said's challenge, it seems necessary-much more-to attempt to treat culture as the product of history, rather than vice versa.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alam, Muzaffar. The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Alam, Muzaffar, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam. The Mughal State 1526-1750. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Bayly, C.A. Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770-1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Cain, P.J., and A.G. Hopkins. British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688-1914. London: Longmann, 1993.

Chatterjee, Kumkum. Merchants, Politics and Society in Early Modern India: Bihar 1730- 1820. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996.

Chaudhuri, K.N. Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean. An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Chaudhury, Sushil. "European Companies and the Bengal Textile Industry in the Eighteenth Century: the Pitfalls of Applying Quantitative Techniques." Modern Asian Studies XVII/2 (1993): 321-40.

Datta, Rajat. Society, Economy and the Market: Commercialization in Rural Bengal, c. 1760- 1800. Delhi: Manohar, 2000.

Dow, Alexander, trans. The history of Hindostan. London: T. Becket and P.A. de Hondt, 1770-72.

Gommans, Jos. The Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire, c. 1710-80. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1994. Guha, Ranajit. A rule of property for Bengal; an essay on the idea of permanent settlement.

Paris: Mouton, 1963. Habib, Irfan. The Agrarian System of Mughal India (1556-1707). Bombay: Asia Publishing

House, 1963. Khan, Abdul Majed. The Transition in Bengal 1756-75. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1969. Langford, Paul. A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727-1783. Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1989. Marshall, P.J. East India Fortunes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976. -. Bengal--The British Bridgehead. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Naoroji, Dadabhai. Poverty and un-British rule in India. London: S. Sonnenschein & Co,

1901. Prakash, Om. The Dutch East India Company and the Economy of Bengal. Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1985. -. "On Estimating the Employment Implications of European Trade for Eighteenth Century

Bengal Textile Industry-A Reply." Modern Asian Studies XVI/2 (1993): 341-56. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations. London: J.M. Dent & E.P. Dutton, 1977. Travers, T.R. "Notions of Contested Sovereignty in Bengal under British Rule, 1765-85."

Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Cambridge University, 2001.



Wilson, Jon. "Governing Property, Making Law, Local Society and Colonial Discourse in Bengal, 1770-1830." Unpublished D.Phil. dissertation, Oxford University, 2001.

Wink, Andre. Land and Sovereignty in India. Agrarian Society and Politics under the Eighteenth-Century Maratha Svarajiya. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986.


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Issue Table of ContentsJournal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient / Journal de l'histoire economique et sociale de l'Orient, Vol. 44, No. 3 (2001), pp. 243-409Reading Mesopotamian Law Cases PBS 5 100: A Question of Filiation [pp. 243-292]Copper Money in Late Mamluk Cairo: Chaos or Control? [pp. 293-321]Is There an East Asian Development Path? Long-Term Comparisons, Constraints, and Continuities [pp. 322-362]Review ArticlesReview: On Landscapes in the Ancient near East [pp. 363-371]Review: Eighteenth-Century Issues in South Asia [pp. 372-383]

ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 384-386]Review: untitled [pp. 386-389]Review: untitled [pp. 389-391]Review: untitled [pp. 391-393]Review: untitled [pp. 393-395]Review: untitled [pp. 395-398]Review: untitled [pp. 398-400]Review: untitled [pp. 400-402]Review: untitled [pp. 402-404]Review: untitled [pp. 404-406]Review: untitled [pp. 406-409]

eighteenth-century issues in south asia

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history of south asia

mughal india

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