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41755 results in Collections

Page 1998 of 2088

  • 5 - Peasant and Brahmin: consolidating ‘traditional’ society

  • C. A. Bayly, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    31 March 1988, pp 136-168

  • Summary

    The result for the British was a long period of economic lethargy which was barely obscured by the slow introduction of the panoply of the modern state. Yet this should not be taken to imply that the early nineteenth century was an era devoid of significant social change. This chapter shows that these years were critical in the creation of the modern Indian peasantry, its patterns of social divisions and its beliefs. Others have argued that colonial rule was peripheral to most of Indian society: it could effect changes neither for good nor ill because the new export trades were fitful and the waves of reform and regeneration were merely paper debates conducted in the corridors of Government House, Calcutta. The chapter holds implications for the definition and operation of caste and for the practice of the Hindu, Muslim, Christian and Jain religions as they evolved during the nineteenth century. Rural people also turned to Muslim revitalisation and reform movements.

  • 2 - Indian capital and the emergence of colonial society

  • C. A. Bayly, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    31 March 1988, pp 45-78

  • Summary

    Military entrepreneurs farmed revenue, engaged in local agricultural trade, and tried to build up holdings of zamindari land in the countryside. From the early eighteenth century the Company had emerged preeminent on India's external routes. In the case of Bengal, Indian mercantile capitalists allied with revenue entrepreneurs and disenchanted soldiers to encourage the expansionist ambition of Company servants. The operation of the new British courts which came into being after 1772, and the greater access to landed income afforded by the early colonial regime, offered them a secure base. The accommodation between British power and indigenous capital a relationship in which Indians were rapidly becoming subordinate was forcefully illustrated in the coastal cities. Indian merchants also took part in the rituals of the European city burgesses, filling several offices in the Madras Corporation which had been founded in 1688. In Surat, the English Company increased its control over its European and Indian rivals after 1730.

  • 6 - Conclusion

  • P. J. Marshall, King's College London
  • Book:
    Bengal: The British Bridgehead
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    31 March 1988, pp 180-182

  • Summary

    This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in this book. The intellectual ferment in early nineteenth-century Calcutta was one of the changes most attributable to colonial rule. Colonial rule brought fundamental change in the way in which the provinces were ruled. The new regime depended on the services of a huge number of its own subjects: soldiers, police, office staffs and a multitude of revenue payers. The East India Company's authority was to be supreme, and those from whom the Nawabs had been unable to wrest power or to whom they had chosen to delegate it were to lose it now. While employment under the British trade has been created in some areas, imports were beginning to threaten the livelihood of the most vulnerable artisans, those who spun and wove the higher quality cotton cloth. Establishing an empire in eastern India proved to be relatively easy; introducing more than superficial change into eastern India was another matter.

  • 6 - Decline and stagnation

  • M. N. Pearson, University of New South Wales, Sydney
  • Book:
    The Portuguese in India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    31 March 1988, pp 131-143

  • Summary

    The decline of the Portuguese empire in India is a much more contentious subject than may at first be apparent. It is indicative of the influence of contemporary cultural bonds on commentators that at the time of the decline the very reverse was sometimes put forward, the trouble with the Portuguese was lack of religion. The sixteenth-century Portuguese administration was pre-modern by definition, just as were those of the British both at home and abroad until the late eighteenth century. The Dutch, arriving in Southeast Asia in 1596, drove out the Portuguese from this area over the next twenty years. They then reduced Portuguese trade in East Asia. The statistics of Portuguese losses in India between 1640 and 1663 are appalling. In the sixteenth century few casados in the larger land areas of Goa, Daman and Bassein had left the cities: private sea trade was the preferred economic activity.

  • 1 - The Portuguese arrival in India

  • M. N. Pearson, University of New South Wales, Sydney
  • Book:
    The Portuguese in India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    31 March 1988, pp 5-39

  • Summary

    Vasco da Gama's arrival near Calicut on 20 May 1498 was the culmination of a continuous, though spasmodic, Portuguese thrust into the Atlantic, south to the Cape of Good Hope, and on to India. This chapter delineates who were the affected Indians, and how they responded to the arrival of the Portuguese. It first describes the political-economic situation in littoral western India at the time of the Portuguese arrival. Then, the chapter examines how the Portuguese attempted to change this situation to their own advantage. During the tenure of Afonso de Albuquerque, forts were established in India to enable the Portuguese to control the trade of the Indian Ocean. The object of forts in Goa and their captains was to enable the Portuguese to achieve several economic aims. One of these was a monopoly.

  • Bibliographical essay

  • M. N. Pearson, University of New South Wales, Sydney
  • Book:
    The Portuguese in India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    31 March 1988, pp 163-176

  • Summary

    This chapter outlines some of the books and articles the author had read over the years on Indo-Portuguese history, and found to be useful. Georg Schurhammer's Francis Xavier: His Life, His Times is strongest for the history of the Jesuits, and especially Saint Francis Xavier, but he includes copious detail on secular sources for the sixteenth century also. When the focus is narrowed down on the literature on the history of the Portuguese in India, and Goa, the quality of the literature declines sadly. V. M. Godhinho's A Economia dos Descobrimentos Henriquinos is basic for economic aspects of the discoveries, while Diffie's section in Foundations of the Portuguese Empire is a good survey of the voyages and their causes. A. R. Disney's fine monograph Twilight of the Pepper Empire: Portuguese Trade in Southwest India in the Early Seventeenth Century also has good data on Portuguese business society in the metropole.

  • 3 - Evaluation of the official system

  • M. N. Pearson, University of New South Wales, Sydney
  • Book:
    The Portuguese in India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    31 March 1988, pp 61-80

  • Summary

    This chapter investigates the strengths and weakness of the Portuguese military and governmental system. It shows how international interests dictated that Hurmuz be left open, at least a little, by the Portuguese. Much more important was the failure to take Aden to control the entrance to the Red Sea. One basic problem was that all officials traded on their own behalf, as well as in many cases being responsible for controlling trade in their particular port. The fuzzy distinction between public and private property can be illustrated by many instances in the sixteenth century, for instance the abuses in Diu. The chapter discusses the official Portuguese system, the one in which they tried to be different and have an impact, by an analysis of three general points to do with the nature of their activities and empire, one of which was their brutality, usually directed against Muslims.

  • 4 - Indo-Portuguese society

  • M. N. Pearson, University of New South Wales, Sydney
  • Book:
    The Portuguese in India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    31 March 1988, pp 81-115

  • Summary

    This chapter looks the areas of Portuguese' social interaction in India by first presenting a case study of the Portuguese capital of Goa, and then discussing religion separately. Portuguese private trade, for in many ways this exemplified Portugal's unofficial activities in India. Viceroy Almeida's preliminary expedition to Coromandel in 1507 was to investigate the general situation, especially relating to trade, and to look for the tomb of Saint Thomas, the Apostle. For the private trader there were differences between areas remote from, and areas controlled by, the official system. The chapter presents a detailed social analysis of Goa so as to show the Portuguese empire in operation, and build on analysis of private Portuguese trade. The most convincing evidence have concerning the role of Indians, especially Saraswat brahmins, in the Goan economy comes from quite detailed statistics concerning the holders of rendas, or tax-farming contracts.

  • Introduction

  • M. N. Pearson, University of New South Wales, Sydney
  • Book:
    The Portuguese in India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    31 March 1988, pp 1-4

  • Summary

    Portugal is the oldest territorial state in Europe; India is one of the world's newer nations. Yet ironically history is much more important, and controversial, for Portuguese than for Indians. It is true that historical writing played a role in the Indian national movement, for some of the writing of the first half of the twentieth century was designed to foster patriotism and pride. Today however Indians are commendably relaxed about their history, as can be seen in vigorous controversies over historical matters in which it seems that all possible points of view can be, and are, presented. These debates are intellectual; the validity of the Indian nation is not dependent on the outcome.

    This has usually not been the case in Portugal; too often their history has had present political meanings. Robert Southey visited Portugal in 1796, and 1800–1, enjoyed himself, and spent years working on a huge, and never completed, history of Portugal. It was going to be a wonderful book:

    I believe no history has ever yet been composed that presents such a continuous interest of one kind or another as this would do, if I should live to complete it. The chivalrous portion is of the very highest beauty; much of what succeeds has a deep tragic interest; and then comes the gradual destruction of a noble national character, brought on by the cancer of Romish superstition.

    (Quoted in Rose Maccaulay, They Went to Portugal, London, 1946, p. 164)

  • 3 - The crisis of the Indian state, 1780–1820

  • C. A. Bayly, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    31 March 1988, pp 79-105

  • Summary

    This chapter examines the working out of the processes of expansion both of the British and of the last independent Indian states. It commences with an overview of the new pressures on the Company's Indian establishments, which finally forged a European military despotism out of the loose congeries of independent mercantile corporations and Creole armies which it had been in Hasting's time. The political theory and practice of the Wellesley circle represented the first coherent imperial policy in British Indian history. The Company's rule in India had come to rest primarily on its military despotism. The subsidiary alliance system posed great problems both for the Indian states and for the British.

  • 5 - Catholics and Hindus

  • M. N. Pearson, University of New South Wales, Sydney
  • Book:
    The Portuguese in India
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    31 March 1988, pp 116-130

  • Summary

    This chapter presents a discussion on the religious interaction of Portuguese India. Around 1540 in Goa there were some 100 priests, though a Jesuit historian tells us they often were ignorant, and most interested in their trade and their concubines. In the watershed year, 1540, in order to encourage conversions all temples in Goa were destroyed. Most Hindu ceremonies were forbidden, including marriage and cremation. One disadvantage with being made subject to the padroado was that this also meant subjection to the authority of the Inquisition. Amongst Muslims the missionaries made almost no converts; they complained about how obdurate these Muhammadans were. Among Hindus also there was strong opposition, or passive resistance. The chapter considers the nature of the much-publicized conversions to Christianity. The continuing influence of Hindu caste notions among Goan Christians is a specific illustration of the way Catholicism adapted, at least a little, to its Indian environment.

  • 2 - Late Mughal Bengal

  • P. J. Marshall, King's College London
  • Book:
    Bengal: The British Bridgehead
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    31 March 1988, pp 48-69

  • Summary

    When Alivardi Khan became Governor of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa in 1740, these areas were still provinces of the Mughal empire. The links binding the three provinces to the imperial centre, had become very tenuous. An independent state was in the making. This chapter explores the kind of state that state might eventually have emerged in eastern India. The three provinces had acquired an administrative system that was almost entirely separate from that of the rest of the empire. The taxation levied from Bengal was one of the major props of the Mughal Empire. The Mughal government employed intermediary collectors to handle the payments from this multitude of small zamindars. Cataclysmic interpretations of the fall of Mughal Bengal along the lines of the breakdown of its government or some powerful upsurge of Hindu disaffection do not seem to have much foundation. The regime was not a dynamic one and it had not put down deep roots.

  • Bibliographical Essay

  • P. J. Marshall, King's College London
  • Book:
    Bengal: The British Bridgehead
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    31 March 1988, pp 183-188

  • Summary

    This chapter presents information on eastern India under the Nawabs 1740-65, and eastern India under the British 1765-1828. Some of the major contemporary histories and chronicles have been translated from Persian into English. The most famous is a translation of the Seir Mutaqherin of Ghulam Husain Khan, which first appeared in Calcutta in three volumes in 1789 and has been much reprinted. Other translations are: Riyaz us Salati, Tarikh-i-Bangala-i-Mahabatjangi, and the selection in Bengal Nawabs. The major collections of eastern India under the British, ordered to be printed before 1801 are reproduced in Reports from Committees of the House of Commons, papers relating to India were extensively printed in virtually every year's Parliamentary Papers. Biographies of the famous Governors, Clive and Warren Hastings, appear regularly. The East India Company's early revenue experiments, the enacting of the Permanent Settlement and assessments of its consequences have provoked a huge literature.

  • Introduction

  • C. A. Bayly, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    31 March 1988, pp 1-6

  • Summary

    When H. H. Dodwell published his fifth volume of the Cambridge History of India in 1929, this book also became the fourth volume of the Cambridge History of the British Empire. The aim of the work was to chronicle the conquest of India by British arms and its transformation by British institutions. This must have seemed a very appropriate theme in the years just preceding the Statute of Westminster of 1931, which laid new foundations for the British Empire and Commonwealth. But since that date there has been a considerable change of perspective. Historians working after 1929 have, if anything, emphasised the importance of India to Britain's world rôle in the nineteenth century even more strongly. However, the nature and extent of India's transformation has been vigorously debated from perspectives that would have seemed alien, even offensive to the interwar authors.

    The importance of India for Britain's imperial system lay in both the military and economic fields. Seizure of the cash land revenues of India between 1757 and 1818 made it possible for Britain to build up one of the largest European-style standing armies in the world, thus critically augmenting British land forces which were small and logistically backward except for a few years during the final struggle with Napoleon. This Indian army was used in large measure to hold down the subcontinent itself, but after 1790 it was increasingly employed to forward British interests in southern and eastern Asia and the Middle East. More symbolically, the Indian army opened up a second front, as it were, against the other great Eurasian land powers, Russia, the Ottomans, France and Austria.

  • 6 - Rebellion and reconstruction

  • C. A. Bayly, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    31 March 1988, pp 169-199

  • Summary

    This chapter deals with rebellions and uprisings, none of which succeeded in excluding the influences of the world market or the Company's state. From its inception, the civilian rebellion and the mutinies reinforced each other. In all these movements there was conflict between landholder and tenants, agrarian labourer or tribal. One of the features of revolt was that the government had very little idea what was happening in the rebel-held areas and where information was available it generally concerned the activities of the great magnates. Elsewhere, quarrels within families seem to have been a major cause of revolt. The most dramatic and immediate consequences of the revolt were felt by the sepoy army itself and its rural allies. The Talukdars' Encumbered Estates Act of 1870 was echoed in Central India where the British opted for a landlord solution and in the Punjab where the few great magnates who had survived the terminal crisis of the Sikh state were prote.

Page 1998 of 2088