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Kerala PSC Indian History Book Study Materials Page 1603
Book's First Pageissues with respect to the causes, means and effects of annexation. Those who argued for or carried out the annexations tended to regard them as moral issues between disparate cultures, with annexations bringing economic and political benefits to all concerned. Those Englishmen writing during the time of the British Raj placed the earlier annexations in the context of their own day. They sought to justify the annexations as politically and morally correct in intent, if not ultimately so, since Indian society remained so fundamentally different from that of Britain. Further, they tried to describe the remaining Indian princes in somewhat different light from the annexationists, Indian princes having become one of the main pillars of the British Raj. Recent scholars have often taken up economic and social themes, and dealt with them in more sophisticated ways. Rather than regard the British or the Indians as monolithic entities, modern scholars examine internal division and conflicts within the Company and Indian society. Some have even recast their arguments about the larger significance of the annexations in moral or historical terms. Thus, commentators and scholars have regarded the annexations in a distinctive light, based on the issues current in their own day. Marxist Historians Likewise, Marxist historians have put the annexation in a different kind of historical evolutionary argument. Following Marx himself, most Marxists perceive European imperialism’s elimination of Indian feudal aristocracy through annexation as a necessary precondition for the progress of Indian society into capitalism. Subsequently, as per their view, the bourgeois commercial and professional elite which arose out of British rule over the annexed territories will have to be destroyed from below by the exploited. Chronology of Expansion Increasing Involvement of the English in Indian Affairs From the mid- eighteenth century onwards, the English Company was increasingly involved in Indian politics, economics and society. A number of Indian rulers sought to exploit or manipulate these British merchants on their coasts, as they had done with earlier foreign traders. The British, however, proved surprisingly