Law, State and Agrarian Society in Colonial India

Abstract

Perhaps the most intransigent problem in the recent history of Indian society remains an adequate understanding of the processes of social change which took place under colonialism. As the continunig controversies within, as much as between, the traditions of modernization theory, Marxism, and the underdevelopment theory make plain, the Indian historical record is peculiarly difficult to grasp with conventional sociological concepts. In the study of Western European society, a focus on the evolution of legal ideas and institutions has proved a useful entry point to social history.The law may be seen to represent a set of general principles through which political authority and the state (however constituted) attempt to legitimize the social institutions and norms of conduct which they find valuable. As such, its history reflects the struggle in society to assume, control or resist this authority. Its study should help to reveal the nature of the forces involved in the struggle and to suggest the implications for social development of the way in which, at any one time, their struggle was resolved. The condition of the law may be seen to crystallize the condition of society. This, of course, could be said of any governing institution. But where the law becomes uniquely valuable is in that, because of its social function, the struggle around it is necessarily expressed in terms of general statements of principle rather than particular statements of private and discrete interest. At the most fundamental level, these principles demarcate the rules on which the contending parties seek to build their versions of society and provide useful clues to their wider, often undisclosed, positions.

Project codification: legal legacies of the British Raj on the Indian mercantile credit institutionhundi

“…One influential account argued that colonial law impeded economic activity and created aberrant colonial outcomes (Washbrook 1981). Recent post-colonial historical work has focused on the delineation made by colonial law on forms of capitalism in the public and private spheres.…”

The Hindu Undivided Family in Independent India’s Corporate Governance and Tax Regime

“…This had its roots in the colonial legal system which set a clear dividing line between the "public" and the "private." Its "public" side aimed at rendering an individual free of moral relations, and law was meant to shape the individual's relations freely in the market, while its personal side entrenched the denominational status based on caste, religion and family as basis for individual rights (Washbrook 1981). 2 This dual characteristic of the HUF shaped its legal status as a unit of business and taxation.…”

Paper, public works and politics: tracing archives of corruption in 1940s–1950s Uttar Pradesh, India

“…This has led to several unanswered questions about the moments and contingencies when corruption becomes important or changes in political discourse. Historical work on the phenomenon of corruption is less developed than in the social science literature, and apart from indirect processes in studies of factionalism (Washbrook 1981;Chandavarkar, 1998), has only recently begun to explore how corruption can be properly historicised and how it might be approached, methodologically, in historical archives (Saha, 2013;Pierce, 2016;Gould, 2012). Using some direct case study files from archived government departments, this article argues, however, that there are some key ways in which the temporal and textual approaches and contextual insights of the historian can potentially overcome and develop some of the lacunae thrown up by social scientists' studies of corruption in politics and administration.…”