Colonialism in India

Sets out the historical entry of European political control into India and compares the main interpretive lenses used to explain empire. Liberal accounts emphasise trade, administration and the spread of law; Marxist accounts stress extraction of surplus, revenue and economic drain; post-colonial accounts stress that colonial rule was constitutive — it created the institutions, categories and borders that still structure Indian politics.

Traces how political control was consolidated into a durable administrative state. The police and civil administration created a uniform, hierarchical system of rule; legal foundations tied Indian jurisdiction to British sovereignty, leaving questions about sovereignty of the Indian Parliament and major constitutional developments that run to the present.

Examines how colonial economic policy reshaped agrarian relations and dismantled indigenous manufacturing. Land revenue arrangements altered land relations and ecological practices, and the deindustrialization debate asks whether colonial trade policies caused long-run decline of craft and manufacturing economies in India.

Studies the colonial project of social reordering. Orientalists and Anglicists framed India in opposed ways — as civilised or as needing improvement — shaping reform and missionary activity. The Census and Enumeration created fixed religious categories, and colonial intervention reshaped gender relations in society.

Examines colonial education as an instrument of shaping subjects. Curriculum and the teaching of English trained an educated elite — the "new middle class" — whose ambitions, employment and political demands followed directly from the education the colonial state provided.

Surveys indigenous resistance before organised nationalism. Peasant and tribal uprisings reflect agrarian grievances produced by revenue policy, and the 1857 Rebellion is the major anti-colonial uprising, whose suppression ended Company rule and led to direct Crown rule.