The eighteenth century in India has been for long the subject of continuing debate among historians. Critical to the understanding of the colonial encounter, this century was marked by two significant transitions that affected the structure of power and initiated important social and economic changes. The first was the transition from the Mughal political economy to the emergence of the regional political orders. The second constituted the transformation of the economy brought about by the increasing influence of the English East India Company. This volume, the first in the debates in Indian history and society series, presents the key axes of the debate, along with a selection of writings that made pioneering interventions in the study of the eighteenth century in Indian history. This approach encourages the interrogation of history, as distinct from the common tendency to present history as a collection of ‘given’ facts. The major debates discussed in this volume are: Dark Age or economic boom: continuity or change: and the debate concerning the nature of the colonial political culture, was it alien or reinvented. Seema Alavi’s exhaustive introduction identifies each core argument, placing it in context. A valuable supplementary text for undergraduate and postgraduate students, this book will make a useful companion for historians of late medieval and modern India, economists, sociologists and the informed general reader.
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