Bengal: The British Bridgehead

Marshall, P. J.

doi:10.1017/chol9780521253307

Cited by 89 publications

(10 citation statements)

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“…Founded in 1600 and despite its abortive military adventures at the end of the seventeenth century (see Stern, ), the EIC's territorial expansion only became sustained after it began military competition with French and Dutch merchant companies. The competition intensified amid the decaying central authority of the Mughal Empire, and as succession disputes among its increasingly independent satraps promised a mixture of political and commercial opportunity (Marshall, ). The Mughal Empire's decline is usually dated to the death of Aurangzeb in 1707, and military competition between the French and English began in South India in the 1740s (Dodwell, ), but a key moment of the emergence of Company territorial power was surely the Battle of Buxar in 1764, when Company forces defeated an indigenous coalition including the Mughal emperor.…”

Section: The Case: Bolts and Verelstmentioning

confidence: 99%

Moral accounting as field foundation in an early modern empire: the English East India Company in the late eighteenth century

Wilson¹

2016

The Sociological Review Monographs

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Field analysis and the relational approach to historical social‐scientific explanation of which it is an instance – helps illuminate the administrative dynamics of empires. While most studies of imperial dynamics emphasize the ‘high imperialism’ of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this article extends field analysis to a crucial case from the second half of the eighteenth century: the English East India Company's transition from a (largely) merchant trading company to a territorial power. In this disordered space of administration, officials struggling with one another for metropolitan recognition provided moral accounts of themselves which, on the one hand, explained their behaviour in terms drawn from abstract, purportedly universal social spaces, and, on the other hand, claimed credibility through a personal ‘interest in disinterest’. I argue that these moral accounts helped delimit the boundaries of and shape the dynamics within a distinctively imperial administrative field. To analyse this transformation, I suggest a synthesis of three varieties of relational analysis: Bourdieu's field theory, Fligstein and McAdam's analysis of strategic action fields, and Padgett and Powell's work on network folding and robust action.

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Section: The Case: Bolts and Verelstmentioning

confidence: 99%

Moral accounting as field foundation in an early modern empire: the English East India Company in the late eighteenth century

Wilson¹

2016

The Sociological Review Monographs

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“…61-78 (2016), DOI: 10.1111/2059-7932.12002 69 C 2016 Sociological Review Publication Limited 2011), the EIC's territorial expansion only became sustained after it began military competition with French and Dutch merchant companies. The competition intensified amid the decaying central authority of the Mughal Empire, and as succession disputes among its increasingly independent satraps promised a mixture of political and commercial opportunity (Marshall, 1987). The Mughal Empire's decline is usually dated to the death of Aurangzeb in 1707, and military competition between the French and English began in South India in the 1740s (Dodwell, 1920), but a key moment of the emergence of Company territorial power was surely the Battle of Buxar in 1764, when Company forces defeated an indigenous coalition including the Mughal emperor.…”

Section: The Case: Bolts and Verelstmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Yet my aim here is less to trace the emergence of a habitus or illusio characteristic of an imperial interest in disinterest, and more to understand how claims to such disinterest could become stakes in the EIC's intra-administrative conflict in the second half of the eighteenth century. 3 Bowen (1991Bowen ( , 2006 and Marshall (1987Marshall ( , 2005 provide more detail on this transition. 4 For a more detailed discussion of the points in the last two paragraphs, see Wilson (2015).…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Moral Accounting as Field Foundation in an Early Modern Empire: The English East India Company in the Late Eighteenth Century

Wilson¹

2016

The Sociological Review

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Field analysis and the relational approach to historical social-scientific explanation of which it is an instance -helps illuminate the administrative dynamics of empires. While most studies of imperial dynamics emphasize the 'high imperialism' of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this article extends field analysis to a crucial case from the second half of the eighteenth century: the English East India Company's transition from a (largely) merchant trading company to a territorial power. In this disordered space of administration, officials struggling with one another for metropolitan recognition provided moral accounts of themselves which, on the one hand, explained their behaviour in terms drawn from abstract, purportedly universal social spaces, and, on the other hand, claimed credibility through a personal 'interest in disinterest'. I argue that these moral accounts helped delimit the boundaries of and shape the dynamics within a distinctively imperial administrative field. To analyse this transformation, I suggest a synthesis of three varieties of relational analysis: Bourdieu's field theory, Fligstein and McAdam's analysis of strategic action fields, and Padgett and Powell's work on network folding and robust action.

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“…This view has been vigorously challenged by the most recent generation of Indian historians, who have emphasized the continuities between the earlier Mughal and later British states and the constellation of small successor states that emerged with the ebbing of Mughal power (e.g. Alam 1986;Bayly 1983;Marshall 1987). The largest of these successor states were the former Mughal provinces of Bengal, Awadh, Benaras, and Hyderabad.…”

Section: The Mughal Collapse Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Mughal Decline, Climate Change, and Britain's Industrial Ascent: An Integrated Perspective on India's 18th and 19th Century Deindustrialization

Clingingsmith¹,

Williamson²

2005

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India was a major player in the world export market for textiles in the early 18th century, but by the middle of the 19th century it had lost all of its export market and much of its domestic market. India underwent secular deindustrialization as a consequence. While India produced about 25 percent of world industrial output in 1750, this figure had fallen to only 2 percent by 1900. We ask how much of India's deindustrialization was due to local supply-side forces --such as political fragmentation in the 18th century and rising incidence of drought between the early 18th and 19th century, and how much to world price shocks. We use an open, three-sector neo-Ricardian model to organize our thinking about the relative role played by domestic and foreign forces. A newly compiled database of relative price evidence is central to our analysis. We document trends in the ratio of export to import prices (the external terms of trade) from 1800 to 1913, and that of tradable to non-tradable goods and own-wages in the tradable sectors back to 1765. Whether Indian deindustrialization shocks and responses were big or small is then assessed by comparisons with other parts of the periphery.

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Bengal: The British Bridgehead

Cited by 89 publications

References 0 publications

Moral accounting as field foundation in an early modern empire: the English East India Company in the late eighteenth century

Moral accounting as field foundation in an early modern empire: the English East India Company in the late eighteenth century

Moral Accounting as Field Foundation in an Early Modern Empire: The English East India Company in the Late Eighteenth Century

Mughal Decline, Climate Change, and Britain's Industrial Ascent: An Integrated Perspective on India's 18th and 19th Century Deindustrialization

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