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

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Cambridge University Press, Jun 11, 1998 - History - 388 pages
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.--Publisher description.

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Contents

Introduction
1
Industrialization in India before 1947 conventional approaches and alternative perspectives
30
Workers trade unions and the state in colonial India
74
Workers politics and the mill districts in Bombay between the wars
100
Workers violence and the colonial state representation repression and resistance
143
Police and public order in Bombay 18801947
180
Plague panic and epidemic politics in India 18961914
234
Indian nationalism 19141947 Gandhian rhetoric the Congress and the working classes
266
South Asia and world capitalism towards a social history of labour
327
Bibliography
351
Index
377
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