A History of India, Volume II

India in modern times: from the collapse of the Mughal empire and the British conquest through to the mid-1970s. The eighteenth-century chapters are by K. A. Antonova; everything from the 1860s forward - the whole of the national movement, independence, partition, and the Nehru and Indira Gandhi years - is by G. G. Kotovsky, who headed the India department at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

The account of colonial exploitation is real history, carefully sourced, and often powerful. Antonova is unsentimental about what the East India Company did in Bengal after Plassey, and gives the figures for what was drained to Britain between 1757 and 1780. The book traces the ruin of the Dacca weavers and the tariff regime that engineered it - a few per cent on British cloth entering India against twenty to thirty per cent on Indian cloth entering Britain - and does not flinch from the famines, recording over five million dead in Bengal in 1943 and identifying the cause not as a failed harvest but as distribution and continued export while the country was millions of tons short.

This is the ground Marx worked in his 1853 articles for the New-York Daily Tribune, where he set down both the drain and the smashing of the handloom.

One caution worth having in advance: although the Russian original is of 1973, the English text is a revised and extended edition whose closing chapters carry India through Indira Gandhi's Emergency of 1975-77, the Congress rout of March 1977 and the Janata government. Date its judgements to the end of the decade.

Volume Two of two. Translated by Katharine Judelson.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.