This classic work in subaltern studies portrays the peasant insurgency in British India from the peasant's viewpoint.

What is colonialism and what is a colonial state? Ranajit Guha points out that the colonial state in South Asia was fundamentally different from the metropolitan bourgeois state which sired it. The metropolitan state was hegemonic in character, and its claim to dominance was based on a power relation in which persuasion outweighed coercion. Conversely, the colonial state was non-hegemonic, and in its structure of dominance coercion was paramount. Indeed, the originality of the South Asian colonial state lay precisely in this difference: a historical paradox, it was an autocracy set up and sustained in the East by the foremost democracy of the Western world. It was not possible for that non-hegemonic state to assimilate the civil society of the colonized to itself. Thus the colonial state, as Guha defines it in this closely argued work, was a paradox--a dominance without hegemony. Dominance without Hegemony had a nationalist aspect as well. This arose from a structural split between the elite and subaltern domains of politics, and the consequent failure of the Indian bourgeoisie to integrate vast areas of the life and consciousness of the people into an alternative hegemony. That predicament is discussed in terms of the nationalist project of anticipating power by mobilizing the masses and producing an alternative historiography. In both endeavors the elite claimed to speak for the people constituted as a nation and sought to challenge the pretensions of an alien regime to represent the colonized. A rivalry between an aspirant to power and its incumbent, this was in essence a contest for hegemony.

DIVArgues for the saliency of the category of the subaltern over that of class./div

Ranajit Guha`s writings have had a formative impact on several disciplines: postcolonial studies, literature, anthropology, history cultural studies, art history. Guha first became known as the practitioner of a critical Marxism that ran parallel to the work of British and French Marxist historians of the 1960s and 1970s but which, instead of recreating a `history from below, sought active political engagement by deploying insights drawn from Gramsci and Mao. More recently, Cuba`s work has drawn attention to the phenomenological and the everyday, and been noticed for its critique of the disciplinary practices of history-writing. Guha`s reputation rests most famously on his role as the founder and guiding spirit of Subaltern Studies, which has critiqued colonialist and nationalist historiographies. In spawning new ways of thinking about history, this has created an intellectual ferment richer than anything else emerging out of modern South Asia. Guha`s historical and political writings, tucked away in obscure journals and collections, have been virtually inaccessible; they are brought together for the first time in the present volume by Partha Chatterjee, whose long association with Guha as a founder-member of the Subaltern Studies editorial board is complemented by his own international stature as a historian, political theorist, and public intellectual. Every serious student of South Asian history, politics, and anthropology will be enriched by the astonishing diversity of insights and scholarship within this book.

The Subaltern Studies Collective, founded in 1982, was begun with the goal of examining the subsequent history of colonized countries. This new group of essays from the Collective's founders chart the course of subaltern history from early peasant revolts and insurgency to more complex processes of domination and subordination in a variety of changing institutions and practices.

A provocative, breath-taking, and concise relational history of colonialism over the past 500 years, from the dawn of the New World to the twenty-first century.