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Industrialization in India before 1947: Conventional Approaches and Alternative Perspectives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge

Extract

Models of industrialization and social change, whether Marxist or functionalist, have been derived largely from the historical experience of Western Europe and, especially, of Britain. Social theories came to be constructed upon a specific reading of a particular, and in some respects, unique, historical development. These theories or models, now deepseated in our historiographical consciousness, increasingly offer yardsticks against which industrial development elsewhere in the world is measured. On closer examination, universal postulates thus derived have appeared to generate a large number of special cases. Vast expanses of the globe are seemingly littered with cases of arrested development or examples of frustrated bourgeois revolutions.

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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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29Ibid., 555–6.

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31Ibid., 562.

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