| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Prasannan Parthasarathi. The Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers, Merchants and Kings in South India 1720–1800. (Cambridge Studies in Indian History and Society, number 7.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2001. Pp. xii, 165. $55.00.

This book argues that, during the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth centuries, weavers in south India were relatively well off compared to their European counterparts, as also were agricultural laborers. However, during the last fifty years of the eighteenth century (the late precolonial period), the power of the English East India Company state greatly increased, enabling it to control these producers with increasing effectiveness, limit their mobility, and curtail their earnings. The outcome of this application of state power was a decline in weaver wages and well being that preceded by several decades the negative competitive impact of British industrialization and full colonial rule. Consequently, argues Prasannan Parthasarathi, contrary to recent revisionist interpretations of British colonial rule that see it as rooted in indigenous forms, there was a dramatic break between indigenous rule associated with "notions of just rulership and a moral polity" (p. 130) and the company colonial state that implemented European-style policies to discipline and fix labor.

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