Raj Chandavarkar offers a powerful revisionist analysis of the relationship between class and politics in India between the Mutiny and Independence. He rejects the "Orientalist" view of Indian social and economic development as somehow exceptional, and reasserts the critical role of the working classes in shaping the pattern of Indian capitalist development. This work represents a major contribution not only to the history of the Indian working classes, but to the history of industrial capitalism and colonialism as a whole.

In a challenge to the widespread belief that poverty and poor living standards have been characteristic of India for centuries, Prasannan Parthasarathi demonstrates that, until the late eighteenth century, laboring groups in South India were in a powerful position, receiving incomes well above subsistence. It was with the rise of colonial rule, the author maintains, that the decline in their economic fortunes was initiated. This is a powerful revisionist statement on the role of Britain in India that will interest students of the region, and economic and colonial historians.

Drawing on a rich collection of sources, Sumit Guha demonstrates how the ideology of indigenous cultures, developed in recent years out of the notion of a pure and untouched ethnicity, is in fact rooted in nineteenth-century racial and colonial anthropology. Challenging this view, he traces the processes by which the apparently immutable identities of South Asian populations took shape, and how these populations interacted with civilizations beyond their immediate vicinity. His penetrating critique will make a significant contribution to the history of South Asia and to the literature on...

Ian Copland's fascinating study of the role played by the Indian princes in the devolution of British colonial power rehabilitates the maharajahs and nawabs of South Asia as subjects for serious historical debate. The author goes on to chart their political demise under the successor congress government in New Delhi, and asks how and why it happened so quickly. The book will add a new dimension to the political history of later colonial India, and will also impact upon the wider history of the twentieth-century British Empire.

Nandini Gooptu's magisterial history of the Indian urban poor represents a tour-de-force. By focusing on the role of the poor in caste, religious and national politics, the author demonstrates how they emerged as a major social factor in South Asia during the interwar period. The empirical material provides compelling insights into what it meant to be poor and how the impoverished dealt with their predicament. In this way, the book contributes to some of the most crucial debates on the nature of subaltern politics and consciousness.

Earlier historians of India's economic history have argued that traditional manufacturing in India was destroyed or devitalized during the colonial period, and that "modern industry" is substantially different. Exploring new material from research into five traditional industries, Tirthankar Roy's book contests these notions, demonstrating that while traditional industry did evolve during the industrial revolution, these transformations had a galvanizing rather than negative effect on manufacturing generally. The book offers new and penetrating insights into the study of India's economic and...

Claude Markovits' book charts the development of two merchant communities in the province of Sind from the precolonial period, through colonial conquest and up to indepedence. Based on previously neglected archival sources, it describes how the communities came to control trading networks throughout the world, throwing light on the nature of these diasporas from South Asia in their interaction with the global economy. This is a sophisticated and accessible book that will appeal to students of South Asia, as well as to colonial historians and economic historians.

Claude Markovits' book charts the development of two merchant communities in the province of Sind from the precolonial period, through colonial conquest and up to indepedence. Based on previously neglected archival sources, it describes how the communities came to control trading networks throughout the world, throwing light on the nature of these diasporas from South Asia in their interaction with the global economy. This is a sophisticated and accessible book that will appeal to students of South Asia, as well as to colonial historians and economic historians.

Set in Hyderabad in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this book, a study of the cultural world of the Muslim soldiers of colonial India, focuses on the soldiers' relationships with the faqir holy men who protected them and the British officers they served. Drawing on Urdu as well as European sources, the book uses the biographies of Muslim holy men and their military followers to recreate the extraordinary encounter between a barracks culture of miracle stories, carnivals, drug-use and madness with a colonial culture of mutiny memoirs, Evangelicalism, magistrates and the...