issues 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