State Formation and Economy Reconsidered

Abstract

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.

The idea of the medieval in the writing of South Asian history: contexts, methods and politics

“…Earlier formulations stressed the patterned nature of state formation, the modular structure of the state, or sought ways to combine older Marxist concepts like mode of production with more flexible notions of state formation and symbolic lordship. 59 Others, like Ronald Inden's 'imperial formation', combined the theory of the 'circle of kings' (rajamandala) set out in the Sanskrit manuals on polity with R. G. Collingwood's 'scale of forms' to see 'states' as complex and entangled hierarchies of lordship. 60 Yet other historians increasingly came to eschew models altogether, arguing instead that 'state-building' was a highly contingent and often localized process undertaken by either aspiring groups or factions and segments within a putative ruling elite.…”

From Reflection to Refraction: State Administration in British India, circa 1770–1855

“…The ryotwari settlement began its development shortly after Cornwallis appointed Alexander Read, assisted by Thomas Munro, to administrate the Baramahal district in Madras over the stern objections of the Madras civilian officials (Stein 1985;1989, pp. 24-25) in 1792.…”

“…Indeed, both in Bengal and Madras, the British confronted a social landscape in a profound state of transformation caused by war, rapid economic change, social dislocation, and mass migration (Irschick 1994). The increasing costs of war, as they had in Europe, had caused some south Indian regimes like the Sultanate of Mysore to institute centralized measures of revenue collection, some of which the British attempted to continue (Perlin 1985;Stein 1985). Both the ryotwari and zemindari systems, however, broke the intertwined web of economic and political power that characterized earlier Mughal and Hindu regimes.…”

“…Read was ordered by the Madras Board of Revenue to institute a permanent settlement along the lines of the zemdinari system, but he defied his superiors and developed the ryotwari system between 1792 and 1799 (Mukherjee 1962;Beaglehole 1966, pp. 12-34;Stein 1985Stein , 1989, when both he and Munro were recalled to military service against Tipu Sultan. Once Read and Munro had left the Baramahal, the Madras Board of Revenue, which was still convinced of the zemindari system's efficacy and upset by Read's defiance, decided to implement it in the Baramahal between 1802 and 1805.…”

“A Politie of Civill & Military Power”: Political Thought and the Late Seventeenth-Century Foundations of the East India Company-State

“…26 Peripatetic courts, noncontiguous states, and overlapping forms of local, regional, imperial, and religious authority-what Burton Stein has called the "segmentary state" in South India-rarely corresponded neatly to centralized or territorial jurisdiction, revealing that "different, even conflicting, principles of political association may exist in the same time and place, and among the same people, and that these different principles may also be understood as appropriate, or 'legitimate.'" 27 The vibrant and viable "successor states" that emerged in the wake of eighteenth-century Mughal decentralization also testify to the "looser, cascading political structures" and "layered and shared sovereignty" that distinguished the organization of political power in the precolonial Indian Ocean world from its later modern, colonial manifestations. 28 Thus, across the early modern Eurasian world, composite forms of state, empire, and sovereignty were central to the constitution of political power-so central that this shared aspect of the organization of political community and culture may be what makes it possible to speak at all about a global early modern period.…”