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State Formation and Economy Reconsidered

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Burton Stein
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Extract

For too long, considerations of state formation in India have divided on the colonial threshold of history, and the British regime in the subcontinent has been treated as completely different from all prior states. The most important reason for this seems to be that the historiography of the British empire was created by those who ruled India; it was therefore a kind of trophy of domination. Other reasons include the vast and accessible corpus of records on the creation of the British colonial state, the recency of its emergence, and the foundational character of the colonial state for the independent states of the subcontinent. Continuity of the British colonial state with its predecessors is acknowledged only in the case of the Mughals owing, in part, to the prolonged process of separation of the Company's government from its Mughal imperial cover before the Mutiny. Thus, long after they had ceased as a governing regime, the Mughals were considered by contemporaries and subsequently by historians to be the old regime of India.

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Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , July 1985 , pp. 387 - 413
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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3This postulate was vigorously reasserted by Professor Irfan Habib at the ‘Cambridge Economic History of India Conference, Cambridge, April 1984.

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30I am grateful to Dr Nicholas B. Dirks for his unpublished paper on this matter: ‘Terminology and taxonomy; discourse and domination: from old regime to colonial regime in South India,’ presented to the 12th Annual Conference on South Asia, University of Wisconsin, November, 1983.

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