Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal of Interdisciplinary

History

Review
Author(s): David Ludden
Review by: David Ludden
Source: The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Autumn, 1989), pp. 338-
340
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/204874
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338 | FRANK D. McCANN

The bankers did not encourage industrialization; rather, they buttressed

the export system, professing "faith that foreign capital would stimulate
development" (56).
The supremacy of coffee was expressed in the popular saying that
"Brazil is coffee" (59). It had the land, the labor, and the transport
necessary to take advantage of the rapidly growing world demand for
the beverage. However, the entry of competitors into the market, the
world-wide depression of I893, and turn-of-the-century overproduction
led to a fall in prices and to government purchases to maintain them.
The various "valorization" schemes saw the supposedly liberal Brazilian
state enacting "the Third World's first institutionalized interventions in
the world market" that for a while controlled "the price of one of the
world's most traded commodities" (9I).
The state's dependence on coffee led to its involvement in railroads.
Although the ruling elites opposed public enterprise in principle, "by
I930 Brazil's federal and state governments owned two-thirds of the
nation's track and administered over half of all track" (93). Some na-
tionalizations of foreign-owned lines occurred to free the federal treasury
from profit-guarantee agreements, others to save weak companies. But
underlying the state's role was an elite consensus that railroads "were
central to economic growth, national security, and territorial integra-
tion" (127).
Topik sees industrialization as developing in the shadow of agri-
culture and views the state's role as relatively neutral, propelled more
by circumstances than by policy. Most state assistance to manufacturing
was aimed at helping agriculture or supporting the treasury. This portion
of the book is less convincing, but does not weaken his central argument
that by I930 the state was actively involved in the economy and that
the public institutions that the Vargas regime inherited were strong and
prepared for more profound intervention.
The book is based on impressive archival research and should be
read by those seeking to understand the processes that have led govern-
ments to intervene in their national economies.

Frank D. McCann
University of New Hampshire

The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom. By Nicholas B.

Dirks (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1987) 458 pp. $49.50

No book reveals the vast terrain of scholarship that opens out from
intersections of history, anthropology, and critical theory better than
this one. Dirks combines ethnographic fieldwork and archival research
in this ethnohistory of Pudukkottai State, in southeastern Tamil Nadu,
from its medieval origins to its colonial decomposition. He deconstructs
and reconstructs many competing yet complementary narrative accounts

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REVIEWS | 339

of the kingdom's long history, and deploys a critical social history to

revise anthropological theories of the theater state and caste society
authored by Geertz and Dumont.1 The result is a new kind of social
history for India and an impressive excursion into the frontiers of ethno-
historical methodology.
The book makes a major substantive contribution to South Indian
studies, is innovative in regard to historical method, and addresses social
science theory. It renders in detail political and social but also cultural
and discursive dimensions of the regional history of Pudukkottai in the
very long term. But the history is also a critique of anthropology. Geertz
is the target in the title, for imperialism made the rituals of the Puduk-
kottai kings theatrical and the king's crown hollow. In the centuries
before 800oo, court ritual in Pudukkottai was essential in constituting
political relations throughout the kingdom, shaping the power of the
state, its military, and its peasant elites. British empire made the Puduk-
kottai court a mere stage, so that village society seemed an autonomous
realm, ruled by caste hierarchy. Anthropologists like Dumont who take
states and regional politics out of our understanding of caste accept as
traditional the India that was constructed by colonial discourse. Dirks
shows in detail what others have argued more weakly: there was no
traditional India outside history.
If Dirks uses history against anthropology not-as Wolf or Worsley
would do-by showing how world history long ago destroyed the
isolation of cultures studied by anthropologists, but by showing how
the history of one society undermines anthropological theories deployed
to understand it; he also uses anthropology against history.2 He does
not just add ethnographic and ethnohistorical data into a historical data-
base. His critical, self-conscious, ethnographic voice constantly invades
the narrative, to put mythology, ethnography, and history on the same
plane, under the same lamp. History is not in charge.
The book is not an easy read for anyone conditioned over years to
absorb empirical evidence in rhetorical forms dominated by historical
theory, debate, and narrative. It is in its very composition that the book
presents a critical statement on stylistic formations of historical prose.
Since his critique is not stated explicitly at the outset of the book, readers
may find it confusing at first.
The initial feeling is that The Hollow Crown encompasses two or
three books that have been written into one so as to obscure an under-
lying anthology of essays on the history, ethnohistory, and ethnography
of Pudukkottai. Awkward transitions are the key: at several points, the
author breaks in to say that we must now turn from one perspective to
another. Why is he so blatant about narrative disruption? It is because

i Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth Century Bali (Princeton, 1980);
Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and its Implications (Chicago, 1980).
2 Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley, I982); Peter Worsley, The
Three Worlds: Culture and World Development (Chicago, I984).

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340 DAVID KOPF

no single narrative is in command where anthropology and history

intersect. We must piece together many texts-by Pudukkottai kings,
Brahmans at court, stray informants, colonial administrators, oriental-
ists, ethnographers, and narrative historians-all with their own voices,
contexts, and trajectories, all susceptible to deconstructive scrutiny, and
all equally evidential in reconstructions of the past. Dirks turns our gaze
from one piece of the puzzle to another, from one facet of the problem
to another, backward and forward in time, keeping our critical eye open
for the author in every text and for the historical discourse in which
every author is shaped, including Dirks himself. As we learn about the
history of society and culture in Pudukkottai, we experience the reform-
ulation of historical discourse on society and culture that is so prominent
in our own intellectual environment today.
David Ludden
University of Pennsylvania

Congress and Indian Nationalism: The Pre-Independence Phase. Edited by

Richard Sisson and Stanley Wolpert (Berkeley, University of California
Press, I988) 420 pp. $48.00

Much credit should be given to Sisson and Wolpert for bringing together
seventeen papers on Indian politics which contribute considerably to the
historiography of the Indian freedom movement. The first chapter is
critical, for in it Sisson reviews the main ideas of the participants, refers
to the history of historical writing on Indian politics during the last
thirty years in a series of lengthy footnotes, and finally promises readers
that the book will provide a "portrait of Congress as a complex mosaic,
a composite of clusters of political resources, asymmetrical in their
geographic and social distribution and intensity of commitment with
different particular interests" (16-17).
The organization of the book around problems (the problem of
mobilization, the problem of political control, and the problem of unity)
and the fact that the scholars are mostly veteran specialists in their
respective fields might give the impression that the papers are discursive
or theoretical and that the collective impact of the studies leads to a new
perspective on either the Congress or Indian nationalism. On the con-
trary, the papers are exceedingly empirical and/or anecdotal; unfortu-
nately, there is no concluding chapter which integrates the immense
amount of data in the papers or even demonstrates how these papers
answer the questions raised in the introduction or have illuminated the
problems around which the book was organized. The final chapter,
which appears just before a glossary of Hindi and Urdu terms, is,
instead, another empirical study-a very good one, it should be added-
on "Congress and the People's Movement in Princely India" by Barbara
Ramusack.

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