In Marx's famous phrase, the capitalist state was ‘the executive committee for the management of the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’. But it is by no means self-evident whose affairs were managed by the colonial state. The colonial state in India was neither the political crystallization of the social power of the dominant classes in India nor simply the instrument of metropolitan capitalists. Rather, its role throughout the colonial period rested upon the mediation of the infinite demands of metropolitan society and the political, social and economic constraints upon their realization in India. Ideally, therefore, an adequate history of the colonial state would have to integrate the changing imperatives of imperialism and the shifting interests of the metropolitan ruling classes, on the one hand, and the processes of social and political development in India, on the other. This paper pays homage to this ideal but it cannot aspire to its realization.

Whether British rule thwarted or fostered Indian economic development has been the subject of a long, largely inconclusive and generally sterile debate which has raged since the early nineteenth century between the proponents of British imperialism and their enemies. Nationalists placed the blame for the impoverishment of India squarely on the effects of British rule. Imperial proconsuls, on the other hand, claimed to have rescued India from primeval Asiatic stagnation.