Articles by Barun De

Political Economy of Penetration of Colonialism into Indian Hinterlands IN the last few decades there has been a welcome movement away in Indian historiography from the rather positivist abstractions of purist economic history to the study of political regions in either a total sense or from the once-orthodox outlook of interpersonal discourse or interest-group lobbying in the determination of state policy. Locales, outlooks, and people are coming back centre-stage, in place of merely abstractions about economic structure or general ideas and abstract ideology. In this trend, it is useful to find books presenting a corpus of hard data on particular regions or people from the comparative and contrasting analysis of which, more general postulates about the total history of the region can be drawn.