Empire of Free Trade: The East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace. By Sudipta Sen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. Pp. 225. $37.50.

Abstract

This book, a revised University of Pennsylvania dissertation, takes up a “classic” topic in Indian history, that of the conquest of Bengal by the East India Company in the mideighteenth century. As much has been written about this portentous event, it is essential to ask what Sen brings to the discussion that is fresh. At the heart of the book's originality is Sen's insistence upon the central role of markets and marketplaces, subjects rarely examined by Indian historians, who have been primarily concerned with land tenure and rural social organization. As he traces the coming of colonialism to Bengal, Sen makes of the market, not the countryside, “the epicenter of the battle for colonial conquest” (p. 7). Sen's second objective is to challenge the revisionist historiography, associated especially with such scholars as David Washbrook, that insists on an easy transition, with little institutional disruption, from indigenous to early colonial rule. As Sen bluntly puts it in his introduction, he proposes to argue against “the interpretation that, under the surface of administrative and commercial expansion, Indian society moved along at its own pace, unaffected by the colonial rule to which it was being subjected” (p. 5). Contest over markets went hand in hand, in his view, with the creation of an intrusive colonial state.