In this series of interconnected essays, Rajnarayan Chandavarkar offers a powerful revisionist analysis of the relationship between class and politics in India between the Mutiny and Independence. Dr Chandavarkar rejects the 'Orientalist' view of Indian social and economic development as exceptional and somehow distinct from that prevailing in capitalist societies elsewhere, and reasserts the critical role of the working classes in shaping the pattern of Indian capitalist development. Sustained in argument and elegant in exposition, these essays represent a major contribution not only to the history of the Indian working classes, but to the history of industrial capitalism and colonialism as a whole. Imperial Power and Popular Politics will be essential reading for all scholars and students of recent political, economic, and social history, social theory, and cultural and colonial studies.

In this book, Rajnarayan Chandavarkar presents the first major study of the relationship between labor and capital in India's economic development in the early twentieth century. He explores the emergence of capitalism in the region, the development of the cotton textile industry, its particular problems in the 1920s and 1930s and the mill owners' and the states' responses to them. The author also investigates how a labor force was formed in Bombay, its rural roots, urban networks, industrial organization and the way in which it shaped capitalist strategies.

In this series of interconnected essays, Rajnarayan Chandavarkar offers a powerful revisionist analysis of the relationship between class and politics in India between the Mutiny and Independence. Dr Chandavarkar rejects the 'Orientalist' view of Indian social and economic development as exceptional and somehow distinct from that prevailing in capitalist societies elsewhere, and reasserts the critical role of the working classes in shaping the pattern of Indian capitalist development. Sustained in argument and elegant in exposition, these essays represent a major contribution not only to the history of the Indian working classes, but to the history of industrial capitalism and colonialism as a whole. Imperial Power and Popular Politics will be essential reading for all scholars and students of recent political, economic, and social history, social theory, and cultural and colonial studies.

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar presents the first major study of the relationship between labour and capital in India's economic development in the early twentieth-century. He explores the emergence of capitalism in the region, the development of the cotton textile industry, its particular problems in the 1920s and 1930s and the mill owners' and the state's responses to them. The author also investigates how a labour force was formed in Bombay - its rural roots, urban networks, industrial organisation and the way in which it shaped capitalist strategies. In a subject dominated by the assumption of unities, Rajnarayan Chandavarkar convincingly demonstrates the fragmentation of class, on the side of both capital and labour. Their interaction sometimes exacerbated their internal differences. But, the author also asks on what terms, to what ends, and under what circumstances solidarities could be forged between workers.

Inspired by Antonio Gramsci's writings on the history of subaltern classes, the authors in Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial sought to contest the elite histories of Indian nationalists by adopting the paradigm of 'history from below'. Later on, the project shifted from its social history origins by drawing upon an eclectic group of thinkers that included Edward Said, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. This book provides a comprehensive balance sheet of the project and its developments, including Ranajit Guha's original subaltern studies manifesto, Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Gayatri Spivak.