This book is a collection of eight essays that bring together Bipan Chandra s finest writings on colonialism and nationalism in India, spanning two decades. The author in these essays puts forth the core elements of colonialism: the complex integration of the colony with the world capitalist system in a subordinate position; a distinct historical stage which modernised colonial societies without initiating a process of independent economic development; a system which while it continued to subordinate the colonial economy, displayed three distinct phases each characterised by a unique pattern of domination and surplus extraction; a structure where the colonial state was an instrument for subordinating all the social and economic classes of the colony, while it served the interests of the metropolitan bourgeoisie.

1. REFLECTIONS ON A THEME by ROBERT ROSS This book, the fourth in the series Comparative Studies in Overseas History, and, like its predecessors, the product of a symposium held by the Leiden Centre for the History of European Expansion, is organised around a single theme, the relationship between the ideological structures of domination and oppression that have come to be called racism and the political and economic ones which grew out of Europe's conquering and ruling much of the rest of the world. By racism, we mean those systems of thought in which group characteristics of human beings, of a non-somatic nature, are considered to be fixed by principles of descent and in which, in general, physical attributes (other than those of sex) are the main sign by which characteristics are attributed. In addition, almost by definition, the systems of thought entailed in this require that there is a hierarchy of the various races, and that those people in the lower ranks of that hierarchy are seriously disadvantaged, at least if the proponents of racist thought are able to impose their will on the society in which they live. ! The exclusion of the discrimination of women from the concept of racism should not be thought as entailing that racist and sexist ideas do not have much in common, since both derive from essentially biological determinism, and indeed 2 racist societies have historically almost invariably been strongly sexist.

"Collection of speeches and articles by the late Eric Williams, along with a few other contributions, reveals Williams to be a consummate scholar and politician as well as a charismatic leader who pursued politics of change in the Caribbean"--Handbook ofL