In the eighteenth-century Bengal was outwardly Mughal. Inwardly it was turning into a British protectorate. In the process it suffered from a double scourge the failure of the Bengal Nawabs to defend their kingdom from external attacks and internal subversions and the predatory lust of the English East India Company operating for territorial and commercial gains from behind the mask of a mercantile comp company. From the Battle of Plassey in 1757 to the Company's decision to stand forth as a dewan in 1772 Bengal was virtually masterless. The Nawabs were puppets while the Company's Government was irresponsible. Out of this and out of some other deeper factors emerged the picture of a catastrophic economic breakdown of Bengal-a process which started earlier but was hastened now. This economic erosion of Bengal's polity was brought under a tangible focus in my books, Metamorphosis of the Bengal Polity 1700-1793 and Economics of Revenue Maximization in Bengal 1757-1793. Facing this erosion, the Bengali Society was split. At the rural level there was an organised effort to cut short the unilateral extraction of wealth from the interior so that some money could be retained in some pockets somewhere in the districts which could eventually be pumped back into the capital short rural economy of the time. This event of assertiveness in the midst of breakdown and loss came to be termed in contemporary official records as banditry which otherwise in the context of Bengal in the eighteenth century was people's coalescence for survival under stress. At the other end of the society at the village and at the town of Calcutta there were men who built up collaboration with the English and mortgaged their sovereignty to build up their status as a new service elite. These men were the go-betweens between the people on the one hand and a tribute-hungry foreign Company on the other. They opened up the interior to the British. These two phenomena formed the substance of my two books Social Banditry in Bengal: A Study in Primary Resistance and New Elite and New Collaboration.
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