Mode of production, social classes and the state.

In this pioneering study of social change Dr.
Bhadra explains and illustrates the processes
of dependent capitalist development in
colonial India. He realizes his objective by
focussing on the historical formations of the
capitalist mode of production, the capitalist
class structure and the capitalist state in
colonial India as a dialectical outcome of the
historical interplay between the British and
the Indian social formations or, what amounts
to the same thing, between metropolitan and
indigenous forces of societal determination.
The examination of the origins and nature of
the alterations in the economic, class and
political structures, which India experienced
in its movement from Mughal feudalism to
colonial capitalism, has been conducted in
order to establish the historical specificity of
colonial social change in terms of dependent
capitalist development along the
stated
dimensions. Furthermore, despite his empha-
sis on the external forces (i.e. contradictory
roles of metropolitan capitalism and its
corollary, colonialism) in generating depen-
dent capitalist development, Dr. Bhadra makes
it abundantly clear that those external forces,
constraints as well as accelerators, were
certainly not the exclusive causal agents of
social change. They acted on and interacted
with both the constraining and the accelera-
ting internal forces in the indigenous social
formation, which eventually led to the histori-
cal formations of the capitalist mode of
production, the capitalist class structure and
the capitalist state. Unlike most others
concerned with Indian social change, Dr.
Bhadra brings home these concrete aspects
of India's dependent capitalist development
from
the rigorous methodological and
theoretical orientations of Marxist Sociology.
What follows as a result is an exhaustive
sociological analysis, at one and the same
time, of the economic roots and their
concomitant sociopolitical ramifications of
Indian capitalist underdevelopment.