I contend that the case Guha builds for the contrast between the classic bourgeois revolutions and the Indian experience is untenable. The episodes he has in mind—the English Civil Wars of 1640–8 and the French Revolution of 1789—were simply not driven by the forces he thinks were at work, nor did they directly produce the consequences he assigns to them. In fine, neither can be defended as a “bourgeois revolution” in the sense that Guha uses the term. The reasons they cannot be so described are different in each case, and so must be addressed each in turn. But in both instances the end point of the analysis is the same.
The significance of this finding is profound, not only for Guha’s argument but for the larger verdict tendered by Subaltern Studies for Indian history and beyond. It turns out that once the two European cases are properly described, the Indian experience no longer appears as a deviation from some classic norm. Indeed, the bourgeoisie’s road to power in the Indian Subcontinent now appears quite consistent with the European experience and settles comfortably into the grooves laid down by them. If this is so, a central plank for the Subalternists’ insistence on a chasm—a “structural fault”—separating the Indian postcolonial formation from Europe will have been dismantled. What this means, and just how significant it might be, is to be explored in the chapters to follow.
The basic facts about the English Revolution are not in dispute. In 1640, the Stuart monarch Charles I convened Parliament for the first time since having dissolved it eleven years earlier. He did so reluctantly, largely in order to raise funds to push back an advancing Scottish army. For much of his reign, Charles had been straining to break free of parliamentary controls on his power. The goal had been to concentrate financial and military initiative in the hands of the monarchy, much as Spain and France were doing across the English Channel. The onset of a new cycle of interstate conflict in the 1620s had made this seem something of an imperative to the Stuarts, who were acutely aware that, on a geopolitical scale, England was still no match for the Catholic powers on the Continent.3 The prospects of following suit, in the direction of an Absolutist monarchy, must have seemed necessary if England were to hold its own against more powerful rivals. The problem was that any attempt to centralize power in this fashion brought the Stuarts into tension with England’s landed classes, who had to agree either to new taxation or to less control over fiscal policy. And the landowners had at their disposal a powerful instrument in the form of the English parliament, an institution largely under their control.
So, when Charles convened Parliament in 1640, after having cast it into the wilderness for eleven years, his agenda unleashed a storm of controversy. Parliament wished to reassert its authority in matters of state, against what it took to be a grasping and incipiently autocratic king, while Charles wished to defend what he took to be his legitimate authority as monarch. The intensity of the conflict between Parliament and king only deepened over the course of the following months, until, in the summer of 1642, civil war broke out. In 1649, after more than seven years of conflict, the New Model Army, under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell, finally won a decisive victory over Royalist forces. It marched triumphantly into London in December 1648, and on January 30, 1649, Charles I was beheaded, the monarchy overturned, and England declared a republic.
For those who have interpreted these events as a bourgeois revolution, the two sides in the war have been taken as representatives of two classes and two antagonistic economic systems. The parliamentary forces, especially the House of Commons, have been viewed as agents of the rising capitalist class, while the royalist side has been viewed as the recalcitrant feudal nobility, standing by the greatest of all feudal lords: the king.4 The victory of Parliament and its New Model Army is naturally presented as the triumph of the bourgeoisie over a decrepit feudal order. This is the interpretation Guha evidently draws on, and apparently regards as so self-evident that he does not feel pressed to offer any evidence on its behalf. His disregard of the matter is curious, for by the late 1980s—the years in which he was developing his initial formulations into the full-fledged essays that comprise Dominance without Hegemony—this interpretation of the English Revolution was almost universally understood as being unsustainable. Even Christopher Hill, perhaps the most illustrious defender of the “bourgeois antifeudal project” view, had beaten a tactical retreat.5 The problem starts with the basic claim that the revolution was launched by a capitalist class to dismantle a feudal political economy.
THE PROBLEM OF FEUDALISM
The fundamental flaw with the view that Guha reproduces is that, by 1640, there was no structural division in the landed class, with a rising capitalist gentry on one side and a refractory feudal nobility on the other. Indeed, by the early decades of the seventeenth century, the English countryside had been largely transformed, so that feudal agrarian relations were a thing of the past all across the kingdom.6 Rural surplus appropriators were, in general, committed to market-dependent forms of production, feudal dues having been replaced by capitalist rent or profits. Hence, there was simply no question of the revolution being antifeudal, since there was quite simply no feudalism to shift away from. The conflict that unfolded and then spiraled into civil war after 1640 took place entirely within a class of agrarian capitalists. The rural magnates that organized Cromwell’s New Model Army as well as those lined up against them on the Royalist side were all capitalists. To be sure, differences in size and status still existed. But these did not map onto divergent modes of surplus appropriation. The war was not waged to install a capitalist order; rather, it was waged over what kind of capitalist order England ought to have.
The issue that brought so much of the landed class to loggerheads with the Stuart monarchy was not the need to transform rural economic relations, but the monarchy’s apparent push toward absolutism. It was a fight over the political order. Over the course of the sixteenth century, the rural gentry had secured its power at the local level. It dominated the Justices of the Peace, the county courts, the religious institutions, and so on, much as the feudal classes had done in medieval times. Now, however, these institutions were turned to the protection of absolute rights in landed property and, through that, the rule of the agrarian bourgeoisie. The Tudor monarchy had, both directly and indirectly, aided the stabilization of gentry rule at the local level. While this did have the effect of underwriting a gradual uptick in rural economic growth, making it possible for England to emerge as perhaps the most dynamic economy in Europe by the turn of the seventeenth century, it also generated a structural dilemma.7 Unlike its rivals on the Continent, the English monarchy had not been able to develop its own apparatus for revenue collection. It relied instead on the domestic landed classes to collect and deliver up its tax revenues.8 This meant that as the pressures of war intensified and the Stuarts felt obliged to ratchet up the intensity of rural taxation, they came into continual conflict with agrarian elites, who viewed this as an encroachment on their own power. What especially rankled was not just the pitch of taxation, but the gentry’s sentiment that their pivotal role in the generation and disbursement of revenue was not matched by a corresponding power within the state. The thrust toward absolutism was thus viewed by the landed classes as an attack on their freedom to rule.9
For the monarchy, the solution to the problem was to reduce its dependence on lordly cooperation in all matters of state, by building new instruments of fiscal and legislative autonomy, centralizing power in the Crown, and reducing the power of Parliament. For the rural lords, the imperative was to reassert their sovereignty as masters of the political nation, to defend the rightful power of Parliament, and in so doing, to beat back the Stuart monarchy’s centralizing ambitions. Their reaction to the centralizing drive did not in any way entail a revolutionary break from, or transformation of, the larger social system. Indeed, the gentry largely understood its mission to be the preservation of the political order from Charles’s grasping hand. After all, this economic and political system served their interests well. They were the only lordly class in Europe to have won absolute property rights in land; they dominated county and parish juridical
