Rise and Fall East India

by Roopali Mukherjee

This remarkable study of the British East India Company offers great insight into the formation of the Company, its impact on both England and India, and the social forces that shaped its development. With great detail and rich documentation, Ramkrishna Mukherjee examines a period of 258 years, beginning immediately before the Company's birth and ending with its collapse in 1858. This is an engrossing work that reveals much about what is no doubt one of the most important institutions in the history of British colonialism and of world capitalism generally.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

445 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1974

Reviews

[Christopher Sutch · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is, deservedly, a classic work of Marxist colonial historiography. First published in the 1950s, it amply synthesizes a great deal of historical and economic research into the British depredation of Indian resources during the 16th-19th centuries (and the details are horrifying when placed in proper context and made specific). The book's importance still rests on that work. There are several problems, however, which is not surprising given the author's own historical context (the work was first published in the 1950s while the author was working at a German university). First, as with many other sociological and anthropological work from that era, the theoretical framework is functionalist, which leads to some serious problems conceptualizing issues of causation; too often the author (and the sources he relies upon) fall into circular logic and teleological traps. Second (and something he would have been criticized for only a few decades later by the Subaltern School of Indian historiography) is Mukherjee's emphasis on making South Asian history fit Marx's supposedly universal framework of historical progress. Much of the "sociological" character of the work, in fact, is primarily centered in attempting to demonstrate that Indian "feudalism" was very similar to European feudalism, and that the colonial process prevented the sort of bourgeois revolution that destroyed feudalism in Europe from occurring in South Asia. Mukherjee predictably is forced to contradict his own work, however, by highlighting how different "feudalism" was in South Asia than in Europe; that short-circuits his argument. Finally, the author relies much to heavily on Stalinist-influenced publications by Indian Marxists from the 1930s-1950s (as, of course, he would have had to), which leads to oversimplification of some of Marx's arguments (particularly, as noted above, on the supposed fixed "stages" of social evolution). Still, this is a valuable work if only for the incredible amount of historical and sociological research that Mukherjee synthesizes to present the incredibly vast and tragic picture of the results of European imperialism on the South Asian peoples and societies.

[Devin Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

In depth review of the rise and fall. The author write well but the people he quotes too often were rather dry passages.