Imperial Power and Popular Politics
Class, Resistance and the State in India, 1850–1950

A major re-appraisal of the relationship between class and politics in India between the Mutiny and Independence.

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar (Author)

9780521596923, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 11 June 1998

402 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.54 kg

"...a stimulating reassessment of the interplay between class relations and political discourse in the India of the Raj." Thomas R. Metcalf, Journal of Interdisciplinary History

In this series of interconnected essays, Rajnarayan Chandavarkar offers a powerful revisionist analysis of the relationship between class and politics in India between the Mutiny and Independence. Dr Chandavarkar rejects the 'Orientalist' view of Indian social and economic development as exceptional and somehow distinct from that prevailing in capitalist societies elsewhere, and reasserts the critical role of the working classes in shaping the pattern of Indian capitalist development. Sustained in argument and elegant in exposition, these essays represent 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. Imperial Power and Popular Politics will be essential reading for all scholars and students of recent political, economic, and social history, social theory, and cultural and colonial studies.

1. Introduction
2. Industrialization in India before 1947: conventional approaches and alternative perspectives
3. Workers, trade unions and the state in colonial India
4. Workers' politics and the mill districts of Bombay between the wars
5. Workers, violence and the colonial state: representation, repression and resistance
6. Police and public order in Bombay, 1880–1947
7. Plague panic and epidemic politics in India, 1896–1914
8. Indian nationalism, 1914–47: Gandhian rhetoric, the Congress and the working classes
9. South Asia and world capitalism: towards a social history of labour
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Asian history [HBJF]