Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars

Abstract

This volume on the social and economic history of colonial India traces the evolution of towns and merchant communities in north India from the decline of Mughal dominion to the consolidation of British Empire following the 1857 mutiny. It provides detailed studies of towns, bazaars, merchants and service people against the background of crucial developments in the political economy of pre-colonial and early colonial north India. It explores the patterns of social and political relations which derive from economic activity and not with economic development or with volumes of trade and production as such. It also analyses the social organisation, ideology and politics of the Indian middle classes of the later nineteenth century by tracing some of their indigenous origins in the society of the eighteenth-century successor states to the Mughal dominion and also in the conflicts and accommodations of early colonial rule. The book analyses the response of the inhabitants of the Ganga Valley to the upheavals in the eighteenth century that paved the way for the incoming British. It shows how the colonial enterprise was built on an existing resilient network of towns, rural bazaars, and merchant communities; and how in turn, colonial trade and administration were moulded by indigenous forms of commerce and politics.