Indian Civil Service Research Articles

The Staging of Sakuntala in London from 1885 to the 1920s

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. R C Dutt (1848–1909) was an author and administrator. He had studied in London 1868–1871 and joined the Indian Civil Service, but returned to London in 1897 to take up a non-stipendiary lectureship in history at University College, London. He continued to share his time between the UK and India until his death.

The Indian Civil Service and the Raj: 1919-1950

The Indian Civil Service (ICS) was the administrative arm of the British Raj in India, and was closely identified with colonial rule. One picture of the ICS is summed up in the title of Philip Woodruff's famous history -- The Men Who Ruled India (a title echoed by David Gilmour's recent book, The Ruling Caste). The image of the ICS officer as ruler runs through many British accounts of the Raj.Indian ICS officers are curiously absent from Woodruff's account, even though they formed more than half the service at Independence. Even more curiously, Indians who wrote about their experiences in the ICS routinely emphasized their role as servants rather than as rulers, in memoirs with titles like Under Two Masters. These memoirs are carefully constructed to disavow their association from the Raj. The image presented is of ambivalent but diligent civil servants, whose did their job despite their nationalist sympathies.Not surprisingly, the ICS was the target of nationalist sentiment before Independence: what is surprising, perhaps, is that the newly Independent Indian state chose to retain the ICS structure and personnel more-or-less unchanged after 1947. My paper is a study of how this came to be -- how was it that the colonial administrative structure survived more-or-less intact through a major change of political regime? My paper addresses three questions in particular: (1) just what was the role of the ICS with respect to the nationalist movement? (2) how did Indian ICS officers experience, and then present, this role? (3) how was it that the ICS structure was left unchanged after independence, in the face of great hostility and opposition?Along the way, I attempt to elucidate the elusive notion of bureaucratic neutrality, and assess the role it actually played in the story of ICS transition.

Aminullah Chaudary. Political Administrators: The Story of Civil Service of Pakistan. Oxford University Press, 2011. 371 pages, Rs 895.00.

A bureaucracy is a group of individuals who are non-elected and serve as government employees to help implement rules and laws of a country. The term bureaucracy was created by combining the words ‘bureau’ which means desk or office and ‘kratos’, meaning rule or political power to govern. Different countries have adopted various ways to induct people to run the government and make new laws. Max Weber, a renowned and notable German administrative scholar is credited to be the pioneer of the use of bureaucracy in public administration. In this book on the Civil Service of Pakistan, the author has described the way bureaucratic culture gained strength and restricted the grooming of political culture in the country. He shows how ‘seniority’ overwhelmed ‘merit’ in the promotion process of the officers in the Civil Service of Pakistan (CSP), an offspring of the Indian Civil Service (ICS). The CSP officers always considered themselves as an élite class and looked down upon the politicians. The author narrates the superior attitude of Iskander Mirza (a notable member of the ICS, then CSP) in these words: “Mirza was proud of his IPS and CSP lineage and never missed an opportunity of proclaiming this fact. His admiration for the colonial system of administration was matched by a corresponding contempt for politicians.” The relationship between the bureaucracy and the military was to ensure that politicians did not make a mess of things. The bureaucracy was able to call on the military in times of crisis and never worried about its overstaying the visit. The basic theme of the Indian Civil Service was that the local Indians were recruited as officers by the British to suppress and control an enslaved people. Unfortunately, even after gaining independence the mindset of the bureaucratic staff didn’t change and they conveniently forgot that an independent nation required a different approach.

Programme Choice and Labour Market Prospects of University Graduates in India Amid Market Crisis

Programme Choice and Labour Market Prospects of University Graduates in India Amid Market Crisis

Americanism in Henry James' "The Modern Warning"

Americanism in Henry James' "The Modern Warning" George Monteiro Of the English-speaking visitors who visited the United States in the nineteenth century and then wrote and published their impressions, the most famous are Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens, and Matthew Arnold. Among the many others now largely forgotten is Sir Lepel Henry Griffin. In 1884, after a visit of some three weeks, Griffin joined the field of those critics of American democracy with "A Visit to Philistia," followed by a small volume titled The Great Republic. The idea for Henry James' story "The Modern Warning"—first called "Two Countries"—came to him from his reading of Griffin's book.1 The work of an individual famous in his day for several well-publicized administrative successes as a member of the Indian Civil Service, The Great Republic takes up the matters of politics and manners in the U.S. as the writer had encountered them. Griffin's stance and attitude, along with the flavor of his language, can be gleaned from the opening pages: America of to-day, the apotheosis of Philistinism, the perplexity and despair of statesmen, the Mecca to which turns every religious or social charlatan, where the only God worshipped is Mammon, and the highest education is the share list; where political life, which should be the breath of the nostrils of every freeman, is shunned by an honest man as the plague; where, to enrich jobbers and monopolists and contractors, a nation has emancipated its slaves and enslaved its freemen; where the people is gorged and drunk with materialism, and where wealth has become a curse instead of a blessing. [In fact] America is the country of disillusion and disappointment, in politics, literature, culture, and art; in its scenery, its cities, and its people. With some experience of every country in the civilised world, I can think of none except [End Page 169] Russia in which I would not prefer to reside, in which life would not be more worth living, less sordid and mean and unlovely.2 In sum, concludes Griffin, "the ideal aristocracy, or government of the best, has in America been degraded into an actual government of the worst, in which the educated, the cultured, the honest, and even the wealthy, weigh as nothing in the balance against the scum of Europe which the Atlantic has washed up on the shores of the New World."3 Most readers on either side of the Atlantic were unimpressed. In the United States, Griffin's work was dismissed as a study of "our institutions through the large lens of a telescope," according to one reader.4 In England, Arnold carefully distanced himself from his countryman;5 while Goldwin Smith joined the dissenters by cautioning that The Great Republic was "too rampant to produce a serious effect."6 In James, who was always alert to possibilities for new stories and novels, The Great Republic sparked an idea of promise: the excesses of patriotism. He had already touched on the subject in stories such as "An International Episode," "Pandora," and "The Point of View." When this last story was published in 1883 in the Century, it prompted an unexpected remonstrance from Thomas Sergeant Perry, James' good friend, over his satirical characterization of the American "democrat." James fired back. "Who are 'the people?'" he began. "I think it odious for any class to arrogate that title more than another. . . . I pretend to be one 'of the people,' moi. And I can imagine no coterie-literature more coterie than a class of novel devoted to the portrayal of the professional democrat."7 Shortly after reading The Great Republic in 1884, James set down notes for a new story. In a notebook entry dated five days after the Fourth of July, he conceived of a character who would stand as the "type of the conservative, fastidious, exclusive Englishman (in public life, clever, etc.), who hates the U.S.A. and thinks them a contamination to England, a source of funeste warning, etc., and an odious country socially." The plot, as James saw it, calls for the Englishman to fall in love with "an American Girl and she with him." The complication, as...

The Indian Civil Service and the nationalist movement: neutrality, politics and continuity

How was it that the Indian Civil Service (ICS), involved as it was in various activities to secure the British Raj against the pressures of Indian nationalism, was able to survive and flourish in the new political order after independence? This article argues that part of the explanation lies in the fact that it was, and was seen to be, a ‘politically neutral’ institution. In the course of making this argument, it surveys the changing role of the ICS vis-à-vis the nationalist movement before independence, and also considers the theoretical question of what is meant by the claim that bureaucratic work is ‘apolitical’ or ‘neutral’ with respect to politics.

Poetic Influences on the Development of Aurobindo’s Spiritual and Nationalistic Convictions

Many in the West have a deep admiration for spiritual men and women from Asia. However, most admirers see only a narrow slice of the life and contexts of such figures. For instance, the idea most Americans have of India's nationalist movement is shaped solely by the life and character of Mahatma Gandhi; Americans generally have no awareness that Gandhi was only one of a wide range of leaders. Also, many Westerners familiar with the thinker and contemplative, Aurobindo Ghose, would be surprised to learn that he was deeply involved with the nationalist movement. In fact, this man, who is portrayed in a popular photograph with calm and otherworldly features, wrote fiery diatribes, argued in support of the use of violence, and was tangentially involved with the famous Muzzafarpur bombing.1 Aurobindo's life (1872-1950) was so varied that his most recent biography is not entitled "The Life of Sri Aurobindo," but The Lives of Sri Aurobindo. His father, Krishnadhan Ghose, had been educated by the British and was a medical doctor. He wanted his sons to be like Englishmen and rise high in the Indian Civil Service, so when Aurobindo was age seven the father brought him and his two older brothers to England to receive their education. In England, Aurobindo was a withdrawn and precocious boy who spent his time reading the classics of European literature, especially the works of the English Romantics. However, he

James Ross Gillespie

James Ross Gillespie (“Ross”) graduated from St Andrews in 1931 with an MA in classics, then from Merton College, Oxford, in 1935 with an MA in history before embarking on...

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

From the beginning, public tests and examinations were instruments of policy. The Imperial Chinese examination was created to permit the emperor to replace the patronage system by which powerful lords were choosing their own candidates to be mandarins. The Jesuit schools in 17th-century France introduced a weekly testing system to allow central control of classroom teaching. In 19th-century England, Thomas Macaulay argued for employing the Chinese principle in selecting cadets for the Indian Civil Service; a similar system was later used for the British Civil Service. A primary school examination system was set up in England at the end of the 19th century to serve the same purpose of achieving quality control and accountability in public schools as was proposed for the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) that is being bitterly disputed in 21st-century United States. Chauncey's primary goal after World War II in developing the Scholastic Achievement Test for admission to elite U.S. universities was to replace the children of the wealthy establishment with highly qualified students who would see their role as contributing to public service.

Fellow British Subjects or Colonial “Others”? Race, Empire, and Ambivalence in Canadian Representations of India in the Early Twentieth Century

early twentieth century, English-Canadian schoolchildren learned to divide British Empire into the man's and the coloured man's country. According to one geography textbook, India clearly belonged in latter category. In vast peninsula of India we find [a] ... coloured man's country, densely populated by nearly one fifth of world's whole population, all of dark skin, but varying in civilization from most degraded savage to highly-cultured Hindu. Following from this division, a region's facility for self-government was explained in terms. While all white man's lands of Empire have Parliaments of their own and a citizenry free to elect members of government, in the coloured man's country natives have no such rights, for in many cases they are mere savages, and in others they could not yet be trusted with such power. (1) The imperial logic that associated absence of home-rule in India with racial character mirrored broader currents of understanding in Canada. A strong affection for Mother among Canadians of British descent, and a firm belief in Britain's divinely inspired benevolence, fueled a racialized rhetoric of empire. According to a popular imperialist narrative, Britain had brought order, enlightenment, and civilization to a formerly backward territory of globe, and Britain's imperial project in India was an inevitable outcome of march of Anglo-Saxon race. (2) These depictions reflected intellectual and political trends in Britain. Quasi-scientific theories of difference--increasingly popular in Europe and North America in latter half of nineteenth century--combined with mythology surrounding Indian Mutiny of 1857 (British heroism versus Indian barbarism), confirmed British ideas about Indian inferiority. Such sentiments, as South Asian historian Judith Brown observes, bred an elaboration of stereotypes of Indians which helped to justify imperial rule.... Indians were, for example, often described as weak and effeminate, deceitful and deficient in character, and incapable of leadership: and thus needing and benefiting from rule by Anglo-Saxons displaying opposite and desirable qualities. (3) Coupled with Britain's considerable strategic and economic interests in region, these attitudes created tremendous obstacles along India's path to self-government. The political demands of India's growing educated classes from 1860s on, and work of Indian National Congress after 1885, brought some concessions, including limited enfranchisement, election to municipal government, and opportunities to join Indian Civil Service, if only as minor officials. (4) Yet by turn of century, scant gains had been made in direction of self-government, and Britain's grip on India showed few signs of faltering. This article explores discursive production of an imagined India in work of English-Canadian educators, intellectuals, politicians, and other public commentators in first three decades of twentieth century. (5) Intellectuals such as Alfred Baker, James Morison, George Wrong, J. Castell Hopkins, and George Sidney Brett, for example, wrote enthusiastically about Britain's imperial project in India. These men, and many other commentators, identified themselves as imperialists--or, at very least, loyal British subjects. Particularly influential were Wrong's various books on history of Britain and Empire (almost always including content about India), which circulated in public schools across Ontario and, to a lesser extent, in Manitoba and British Columbia during first half of twentieth century. The ideas of these authors, moreover, were generally disseminated through organizations and publications that were imperialist in orientation (or at least imperial-friendly), such as Empire Club of Canada, Globe and Mail, and Canadian Annual Review of Public Affairs. …

Further thoughts on an enigma

The article seeks to re-examine the career and work of a celebrated ‘adventurer’ of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, the Venetian Nicolò Manucci (1638–c. 1720). Manucci's work, translated into English in the early twentieth century by William Irvine of the Indian Civil Service, but never published in the original, has evoked much controversy over the years. Some have treated it as a valuable and authentic source on events in Mughal India and elsewhere, while others—notably historians of music and culture—have pointed to its flagrant inaccuracies and exaggerations. In recent times, some have also claimed for it the status of a history of popular perceptions of the Mughal dynasty. This article returns, as it were, to the sources, looking to the original manuscripts that Manucci left, as well as recent and valuable research conducted on him by Italian scholars. A complex portrait emerges of a tortuous and fascinating career in which alienation is a central theme.

Robin Hyde (Iris Wilkinson), 1906-1939

Robin Hyde, poet, novelist, journalist, is now acknowledged as a major figure in New Zealand twentieth-century culture, although the literary nationalist group that became prominent in New Zealand in the late thirties and early forties temporarily eclipsed her reputation. Hyde had an immensely productive short life but the self-doubt and anxiety that had plagued her were exacerbated by the social isolation of London and she committed suicide there at the age of thirty-three. During her lifetime Hyde was well-known as an outspoken journalist and literary commentator as well as poet and novelist; her intelligence as a writer, the stylistic interest and beauty of her work, and her ability to encapsulate and comment on contemporary society have only been fully understood as her novels have been brought back into print, her autobiographical writings discovered, and unpublished papers—including poems, letters and short fiction—further studied in the context of her life. These new discoveries reveal her as a female modernist, even in some respects a New Zealand Frida Kahlo figure, whose physical suffering and experience of gender politics in personal and professional life gave her work a special resonance; and because Hyde’s writing drew so much on her own experience, it is of particular importance to understand her literary and personal history together. Hyde was born Iris Wilkinson in Cape Town on the nineteenth of January 1906. Her family history reveals a complex engagement in imperial projects— war, communications, and colonial administration—that characterised a significant part of the movement of population to New Zealand and other Commonwealth countries at the beginning of the twentieth century. Her father, George Edward was born in Agra, where his father (originally from Yorkshire) had a successful career in the Indian Civil Service. At eighteen years old he joined an Anglo-Indian corps to fight in the Boer War. After the war hospitalised with war wounds, his wife-to-be, a twenty-nine-year-old Australian, working in South Africa en route to England, nursed him. Unsure as to employment, George finally settled with the post and telegraph service and when Adelaide (Nelly) nee Butler fell pregnant they married. Following the birth of their second daughter, Iris, the family sailed for New Zealand, perhaps assuming that country would also need young men with experience in

Life Writing and Victorian Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Life Writing and Victorian Culture Francis O'Gorman (bio) David Amigoni , ed. Life Writing and Victorian Culture. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. xv, 239 pp., illus. ISBN 0-754-63531-7, $99.95. "Life writing" in the Victorian period is now well recognized to comprise a diversity of literary forms. Diaries, obituaries, journals, fictionalized autobiographies, and letters are among the genres recently established alongside the corpus of formal biographies and autobiographies as legitimate topics for scholarly study. David Amigoni's new collection of essays is a decisive confirmation of the current trends in the study of life writing, and will prove, I think, an extremely useful exemplification of developments in this area over the last ten years or so. Modern concerns with gender, sexuality, nationality, and class are prominent. Suspicion of any notion that writing reveals transparently is evident too, and the essayists to different degrees work with the assumption that writing gives impressions, that it is to some degree involved in acts of strategic shaping, that it is always-already involved in some form of ideological contest. Such theoretical postures are, of course, more or less universal in literary study and cultural history now, though their prominence in life writing studies is still noticeable. The language of self-description, most readers now assume, is axiomatically un-innocent, and such assumptions, born chiefly of Barthes, Foucault, and Stephen Greenblatt, but with Oscar Wilde in the background, have made it difficult for readers wholly to believe that expressions of human virtue, wisdom, or decency can be really what they seem. Victorian earnestness has become, under such conditions, pretty much unreadable. Widely accepted here as familiar motivations, conscious or otherwise, for the shaping of life-writing's rhetoric are the matters of arranging one's life for posterity, and of legitimizing it in culturally dominant and approved terms. The languages of class affiliation—understanding class here in no narrow sense—emerge in the foreground as a dominant interpretative category for reading. Martin Hewitt's opening essay returns him to the subject of Samuel Bamford and to the important question of the relationship between diary and autobiography. Exploring the "post-autobiographical" nature of Bamford's diaries, Hewitt's engaging essay is a reminder to historians approaching such documentary sources of issues in the evidential status and rhetorical purposes of diary writing. Alison Booth moves away, rewardingly, from the study of what she calls "individualist models of identity and development" [End Page 105] (41) to consider collective biographies or "prosopographies" before the Dictionary of National Biography (1885–). It is easy to forget that the DNB had a conspicuous tradition behind it of collective representations which, Booth argues, functioned to provide exempla of good citizenship. Her interest is particularly in biographical collections that portrayed literary homes, especially those that preserved the "commonplace middle-class interiors of men and women of letters" (61). Donna Loftus is intrigued by discourses of control in narratives of self-help in the period, and in the creation, as she sees it, of professional identities in middle-class male autobiographies. Male masochism interests Martin Danahay, and he proposes the controversial notion that "Rather than recognize the psychic pain that they were causing themselves, Victorian men would look 'outward' to find compensation for their own inner pain in idealised images of the other" (87). Masochism is not in this respect sexual, but proposed as a defining feature of male self-control in the period. Not all readers will find the theoretical underpinning of this account helpful, but the analysis of matters of self-restraint, of the inner conflicts necessary for civilized behavior, emerge beyond that as a productive frame for debating male identity in the period before Freud produced a notion of self-control as fundamental to human maturation. Trev Lynn Broughton's work on masculinity in the late Victorian period has been of consequence. In her essay on Philip Meadows Taylor's The Story of My Life (1877), she considers autobiographical writing from the Indian civil service, challenging Benita Parry's somewhat off-hand remark that such writing was "self-congratulation couched in flatulent prose" and "preoccupied with rank and advancement" (qtd. 105). Broughton's most interesting argument is to...

Thomas Henry Flewett

Thomas Henry Flewett was born on 29 June 1922 in India, where his father was a member of the Indian Civil Service. He attended Campbell College, Belfast, followed by medical...

Governing British Burma: The career of Charles Bayne (1860 – 1947) in the Indian Civil Service

My grandfather, Charles Bayne, spent his career in the Indian Civil Service administering Burma from 1880 to 1906. He and three colleagues—Edward Symes, Donald Smeaton and Herbert Thirkell White—filled the key posts in the central Burmese administration for two decades. He assisted Sir Charles Crosthwaite (Chief Commissioner 1887 – 90) in pacifying the province after the third Burmese war. Through the calmer 1890s he was responsible for economic policies, especially rice cultivation and teak forests. But the quartet broke up in the 1900s: Symes committed suicide; Smeaton fell out with Lord Curzon; Bayne, after two breakdowns, retired early; only White survived, to end his career as Lieutenant Governor. Burma's experience 100 years ago has parallels with the occupation of Iraq and the advance of globalization. The British annexed Upper Burma before deciding its future. The colonial administration was orderly, but inhibited the growth of locally based, democratic government, with consequences still seen today. Burma under British rule grew rich from the export of rice and teak (and later oil), but this wealth went mainly to expatriates, not local Burmese cultivators. The resentment this caused later brought a reversion to inward-looking economic policies.

Evangelical mission and the railway workshop apprentices: Institutionalising Christian presence in imperial Bengal, 1885–1914

Personal limitations prevented the Reverend Charles Bradburn of the Church Missionary Society from contributing to the conversion of unbelievers in poor communities in Nadia District. As a Manchester yarn-agent's son, however, he had assimilated a vision of economic enterprise to his uncompromising evangelical convictions. He developed it in the light of an ethically resonant Scandinavian discipline of carpentry (Sloyd), which also had followers in Britain and the United States. On this basis he was to contribute to the ‘institutionalisation’ of the Christian presence in India by developing collusive relationships between the CMS schools and a range of imperial political and administrative agencies, government departments and expatriate employers. As a ‘patron’ of the poor, not all of them descendants of earlier converts, he offered his clients training and the prospect of gainful employment. As a client of government, he earned grants for training dependable workers and generating employment. His contributions to a general institutionalisation of the Christian presence in Bengal was highly regarded by the Indian Civil Service. Approval in the CMS hierarchy in London was more uncertain.

A Crucial Administrative Interlude: Sir Antony MacDonnell's Return to Ireland, 1902-04

You are about to leave India/* George Curzon, the viceroy of British India, told Sir Antony Patrick MacDonnell in 1901 at the end of a long career, a record?unprecedented at the present moment?and equal to the most illus trious of Indian administrators in the past.1 Curzon, at times a very harsh critic, was not alone in his estimation of MacDonnell, the most eminent and accomplished of late-Victorian civil servants in India. What was even more extraordinary was that even though the Viceroy's words in 1901 were written after MacDonnell had been a member of the Indian Civil Service (ICS) for some thirty-six years, he was about to embark upon a second distinguished admin istrative career as under secretary for Ireland.2 In the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, India and Ireland were Britain's most important overseas territories. These two dependencies possessed a number of similarities in what Scott B. Cook has described as intra-imperial analogies.3 Both India and Ireland constituted crown colonies, defined as those that were controlled directly from Westminster, spawned con stitutional and revolutionary nationalist movements, possessed a plurality of religions and cultures, and were basically agricultural peasant economies. The Irish administration, with its viceroy, who represented the crown, and its chief secretary, who represented parliament, served loosely as a model for the gov

J. S. Furnivall and Fabianism: Reinterpreting the ‘Plural Society’ in Burma

Buried in an obscure journal published in Burma is a letter addressed to its readers commemorating the tenth anniversary of the publication. The editor had asked one of the publication's founders, a well-known former Indian Civil Service (ICS) officer turned progres-sive reformer, to pen a few lines. Years later, the writer achieved acclaim as an ardent supporter of Burmese nationalism and independence and one of the founding scholars of Burma and Southeast Asia studies. These were his words of inspiration to an audience that comprised mostly educated Burmese:Burma did not lose its independence because the rulers of Burma came into conflict with the British Empire, but because they had not sufficient wisdom to preserve their country; they did not know enough of Burma or of the outside world. And it will not again be capable of independence until Burmans know enough of Burma and of the outside world to guide its destinies.In essence, the Burmese were responsible for their own colonisation because they lacked ‘wisdom’ and only through gaining this elusive knowledge could they be free. This opinion was based on nearly three decades worth of first-hand observation of Burmese society. The author was J. S. Furnivall.

Greek, Latin and the Indian Civil Service

The whole question of the future of the East is full of interest, and is, perhaps, the greatest political question in the world.(Benjamin Jowett)… a corps of men specially selected, brought up in a rigour of bodily hardship to which no other modern people have subjected their ruling class, trained by cold baths, cricket, and the history of Greece and Rome …(Philip Mason)In his essay ‘Comparativism and references to Rome in British imperial attitudes to India’, Javed Majeed shows how Greek and Latin figured prominently in the examinations for the Indian Civil Service, the prestigious administrative body that David Lloyd George called ‘the steel frame’. Greek and Latin were not just used to attract and shape a class of ruling ‘gentlemen’, but were also part of a complex structure of attitude and practice designed ‘to preserve the ICS as a monopoly of European officers’. Majeed's insightful essay sheds light on the role of ICS examinations and on the function of Classics in colonial contexts, although it is mainly about comparative approaches to the British and Roman empires.

Ghost Hunting in Colonial Burma

The legendary status of J.S. Furnivall, former Indian Civil Service (ICS) officer turned Burma scholar and reformer, in South East Asian studies is unique. He has eluded the criticisms of his ‘orientalism’ that his contemporary colonial bureaucrat-scholars now face. This essay examines Furnivall's biography alongside notions of paternalism and nostalgia among the ICS in Burma during Furnivall's tenure, and their impact on his critiques of colonial policy in both his widely-read and obscure writings. The paper argues that Furnivall's views on colonialism are more ambiguous than widely believed, suggesting that South East Asianists should reassess their opinion of Furnivall and of their field's own historiography.