A Rule Of Property For Bengal :An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement - Softcover

Ranajit Guha

Softcover

ISBN 10: 8178244829 ISBN 13: 9788178244822

Publisher: Orient BlackSwan, 2016

Synopsis

œ... A pioneering work on the intellectual origins < br/> of [the permanent settlement; strong> Holden furber</strong> (1964)</br>
The infamous permanent settlement of Bengal in the eighteenth century was the most disputed step in the agrarian field ever taken in India under British rule. Why did it happen? Written with uncommon elegance, ranajit guhas classic study”a pioneering work in Indian intellectual history”provides the answers by looking at the ideas and thinking of the policy-makers who radically changed the way in which India was taxed and ruled.</br>

guha considers why European ideas about capitalism in farming and methods of revenue collection were thrust upon a colonial society. He shows that British administrators such as Lord cornwallis and Philip Francis were far more considerably influenced by the French physiocrats than by Indian conditions on the ground. He elaborates on the philosophical antecedents of the settlement in the works of Alexander Dow, Henry pattullo, and Philip Francis, outlining the contradictions between their views and those of Warren Hastings.</br>
This third, attractively re-set, edition of a seminal work that has been in print since 1963 includes two new essays by Partha Chatterjee and Rudrangshu Mukherjee. Together, they position this book within Indian historiography and reveal precisely why it remains indispensable for anyone involved in thinking seriously about colonial rule and the making of modern South Asia.</br>.

About this title

Review

"Constituting an archaeology of certain modes of colonialist knowledge, A Rule of Property for Bengal is most important for its patient elaboration of how modes of knowledge, developed to account for European civil society, are modified in their intersection with the political exigencies of the colonizing project to become hegemonic for both the rulers and the native elites."-David Lloyd, University of California, Berkeley "Guha's study, still controversial, remains the decisive study of the Permanent Settlement."-Ronald Inden, University of Chicago

About the Author

Ranajit Guha is Senior Research Fellow Emeritus at the Research School of Paci c and Asian Studies, Australian National University. He is the founder-editor of Subaltern Studies.

Edition details

• Publisher: Orient BlackSwan
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 8178244829
• ISBN 13: 9788178244822
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 330