NEW EDITION OF A CLASSIC


RG on 13 July 2016 with the new edn of his old classic.

Photo courtesy Rudrangshu Mukherjee

On 13 July 2016, Rudrangshu Mukherjee visited Vienna

and presented Ranajit Guha with the

'first copy' of the new edition. This new edition

includes two newly commissioned essays on

A Rule of Property for Bengal,

one each by Partha Chatterjee and

Rudrangshu Mukherjee

“. . . a pioneering work on the intellectual origins

of [the Permanent Settlement]”—Holden Furber (1964)

This third, attractively re-set, edition of a seminal work that has been in print since 1963 includes two new essays by Partha Chatterjee and Rudrangshu Mukherjee. Together, they position this book within Indian historiography and reveal precisely why it remains indispensable for anyone involved in thinking seriously about colonial rule and the making of modern South Asia.

The infamous Permanent Settlement of Bengal in the eighteenth century was the most disputed step in the agrarian field ever taken in India under British rule. Why did it happen? Written with uncommon elegance, Ranajit Guha’s classic study—a pioneering work in Indian intellectual history—provides the answers by looking at the ideas and thinking of the policy-makers who radically changed the way in which India was taxed and ruled.

Guha considers why European ideas about capitalism in farming and methods of revenue collection were thrust upon a colonial society. He shows that British administrators such as Lord Cornwallis and Philip Francis were far more considerably influenced by the French Physiocrats than by Indian conditions on the ground. He elaborates on the philosophical antecedents of the Settlement in the works of Alexander Dow, Henry Pattullo, and Philip Francis, outlining the contradictions between their views and those of Warren Hastings.

PB | Rs 595

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