From commerce to conquest: The dynamics of British mercantile imperialismin eighteenth-century Bengal, and the foundation of the British Indian Empire
Year: 1990
Type: article
Abstract: “We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind … Our acquisition of India was made blindly. Nothing great that has ever been done by Englishmen was done so unintentionally, so accidentally, as the conquest of India.” John Robert Seeley, The Expansion of England (1884 edition, pp. 8, 179; 1971 edition, pp. 12, 143).“At a time when demand was the chief collective concern of the mercantilist powers, East Indian trade offered no solution. Indeed to make this trade ‘useful’ India would have to be peripheralized, and to do this was considered not worth the effort by the English…until the post-1750 upturn. It was, in fact, at that time that the British began the political conquest of India and its economic peripheralization.” Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System II (1980, pp. 97–98).The most vigorous and sustained debate on the nature and causes of British imperialism has focused on the British Empire of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. However, there are also significant differences in perspective among historians and social scientists writing about British imperialism in its eighteenth-century preindustrial, or mercantile, stage. In fact, with regard to British imperialism in eighteenth-century Bengal, as well as in eighteenth-century India more generally, the debate has been more heated than the historiographical debate on nineteenth-century, especially early nineteenth-century, British expansion in the subcontinent. In their analysis of dynamics and motives, some historians of the eighteenth century, as well as those who write about imperialism more broadly, have assigned high priority to political factors, while others have put far greater emphasis on economic factors, resulting in a number of differing interpretations of the role of political and economic motives. At the same time there are a growing number of studies that, while still reflecting the political-economic split, broaden the analytical framework and emphasize the pressures of the competitive nation-state system, or the logic of a burgeoning international world-capitalist order, not to mention a few interpretations that underline psychological and techno-military factors.
Author: Mark T. Berger
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2317240307