Author: Dharma Kumar
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2000
Language: English
Pages: 385
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0195651510
Description
This volume brings together several essays, mainly historical, written over the last three decades or so. Some of these essays have not been published before. Some of the papers were stimulated by conferences.
In this collection of essays that reflects the width of her corpus, Dharma Kumar examines diverse issues – the nature of the colonial state, land distribution, and the extent of taxation in Mughal India. A comprehensive introduction to the volume goes over recent literature on all the themes covered – Madras Presidency, land, comparative studies of India, China, and Indonesia, and the evolution of the colonial state.
This book will interest postgraduate students of Indian history and economics, teachers and researchers.
EXCERPTS FROM REVIEWS:
Dharma Kumar is among the foremost economic historians in India. This book revisits many of the issues and themes that have occupied the author over the years. In keeping with the title of her book, most of the essays, despite the thematic arrangement, do keep coming back to grapple with issues of colonialism, its differential experience in various colonies, and the nature and role of the colonial state.
- Biblio
Topics vary but the economist’s analytical bite, market orientation and empirical commitment stabilize a volume whose central preoccupation is India’s economic development, especially its inequalities and empirical heritage. The repeated throwing down of the gauntlet to stimulate more empirically precise arguments is a most impressive feature of the historical essays here.
- The Indian Economic and Social History Review
Contents
Colonialism, Property and the State
* Landownership and Inequality in Madras Presidency -1853-1947
* The Forgotten Sector: Services in Madras Presidency in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century
* The Persistence of Land Fragmentation in Peasant Agriculture: An * Analysis of South Asian Cases
* A Note on the Term Land Control
* Private Property in Asia? The Case of Medieval South India
* The State and Private Property: some General Considerations
* Regional and International Economic Disparities Since the Industrial Revolution: The Indian Evidence
* The Taxation of Agriculture in British India and Dutch Indonesia
* The Colonial tradition in India and Indonesia
* State and Civil Societies in Modern Asia
* The Chinese and Indian Economies, 1914-1949
* Colonialism, Bondage, and Caste in British India
* Governance and the Colonial Legacy: Some Preliminary Considerations
* Was the Colonial State in India a Predatory State
* The Anti-Communalism Project of Left Secularist Historians
Index