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.

Norbert Peabody analyzes changes to the foundations of royal power in the Rajasthani kingdom of Kota during the late precolonial and early colonial eras. Peabody charts these changes in relation to broader socio-economic transformations within the larger royal polity. He concludes that different societies not only establish different co-ordinates of value in their constructions of the past, but also that the very processes of social and political transformation differ from society to society.

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.

A substantial collection of unpublished articles, lectures and papers from one of the finest Indian historians of the twentieth century.