The Rise and Fall of British India

A great deal of argument about the theory and practice of imperialism has been generated in recent years, much of it Eurocentric and much of it focusing on the causes of imperialism. In this singularly clear and perceptive study, first published in 1983, Karl de Schweinitz concentrates instead on a view of imperialism as a coercive relationship between politically and economically engaged societies that are in any event are the consequence of a world of scarce resources. He looks at the relationship between England and India, illustrating the factors in Indian society which allowed domination by a foreign power, the effects of this domination on India and the ways in which the relationship came to be unacceptable. Professor de Schweinitz's analysis of the rise and fall of the British Raj hinges on the changing pattern of the economic, political, military, technological and ideological assets that England and India brought to the relationship. It reaches the centre of an important and complex problem in thus viewing this story of imperialism as a species of inequality, and provides a means for assessing the coerciveness of other imperialisms as manifested in the relative strength of these assets among pairs of interacting societies.

Karl de Schweinitz Jr