In recent decades, scholars of civil war have begun to dig deeper into the history behind contemporary conflicts using new datasets and sophisticated quantitative analyses. Many of these studies have linked the origins of civil war in states across South America, Africa, and Asia to the era of European colonialism.
Shivaji Mukherjee’s Colonial Institutions and Civil War: Indirect Rule and Maoist Insurgency in India is a new entry into this literature, tackling the important case of the world’s largest colony and its long-running Maoist insurgency. This conflict was once considered India’s gravest internal security threat, having taken place from 2005–12 in as many as 30% of the country’s districts (p. 6). Mukherjee’s central argument is that “different forms of colonial indirect rule…created long-term persistent and path-dependent effects conducive to leftist ideological insurgency in India” (p. 10). Specifically, indirect colonial rule led to low state capacity and development and the political exclusion of indigenous groups. This created grievances among the population and opportunities for rebels.
One of Mukherjee’s central aims is to develop a “more fine-grained typology of different types of indirect rule” (p. 19). He differentiates between formal indirect rule in the “princely states,” areas that remained under the control of native rulers, and informal indirect rule in British areas that came under zamindari (landlord) tenure. Direct rule, which is not dichotomized, occurs in British areas under ryotwari (cultivator) tenure. Rather than code all British areas as direct rule and all princely states as indirect rule, as many scholars do, Mukherjee argues that indirect rule occurs through native rulers, whether they are princes or landlords. Using a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods, Mukherjee then shows that indirect rule(s) created the grievances exploited by Maoist rebels in both the northern epicenter of the conflict (landlord areas in Bengal, Bihar, and Jharkhand) and the south-central epicenter (princely states in Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, etc.). At the end of the book, he suggests that this theory can generalize to neighboring cases in Burma and Pakistan.
Mukherjee’s work offers some real advancements to the study of colonialism and civil war. First, he is right to move beyond the binary direct/indirect rule conceptualization and coding used by many previous scholars. Chapter 6 illustrates the full promise of doing so, as he builds on the work of historian Barbara Ramusack to code five distinct kinds of princely states in his quantitative analysis. To deal with selection issues—why certain areas came under colonial rule whereas others did not—Mukherjee develops a new and plausible instrumental variable for colonial indirect rule in India based on the timing of European wars, which reduced the willingness of the British to annex princely states (pp. 136–37).
The best part of the book is Mukherjee’s extensive fieldwork in India—in conflict zones, no less—and his case study chapters are richly detailed. In chapters 7 and 8, for example, he draws on a unique blend of archival documents, state legislative assembly data, and data on Maoist influence at polling stations to test his theories at the subdistrict level in two case studies from the southern epicenter of the conflict. There is significant contextual knowledge that scholars will glean from these chapters.
At the same time, it is fair to question whether Mukherjee’s conceptual, theoretical, and empirical innovations are ultimately successful. The biggest concern is his new typology of indirect rule, the linchpin of his theory. Although Mukherjee’s coding of different kinds of princely states is valuable, the category of informal indirect rule is more problematic. At the outset, it is never clearly explained why this category should be coded on the basis of how the land tax was collected. Mukherjee argues in passing that rule by landlords required less bureaucratic capacity by the colonial state (p. 10), but there is no discussion of how other important aspects of colonialism should figure into this coding. With the arrival of the British came an increased military presence, a new civil service, a new judiciary, new educational institutions, and so on, but all these factors are insufficiently discussed in Mukherjee’s analysis.
The value of any historical coding lies in how it aligns with reality on the ground. According to Mukherjee, because the land tax was collected by landlords, Bengal Province (modern-day Bangladesh, West Bengal, Bihar, and Jharkhand) was an area of indirect rule. But the British established their supremacy in India through eighteenth-century battles fought over Bengal. The Bengal Presidency was the most powerful of the presidencies of British India, and the governor-general of Bengal was the viceroy of India. It was one of the richest provinces, and English-language education had proceeded furthest there. Bengal was a key site of protests and movements for independence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the capital of British India (Calcutta) was in Bengal until 1911. How can this level of colonial penetration be indirect rule?
It is also unclear how to evaluate Mukherjee’s theory compared to existing work. Mukherjee critiques many other studies for not being able to explain the “full” (p. 26) or “entire spatial variation” (p. 29) of the Maoist conflict; that is, for not being able to explain why violence does not occur in some areas where we might expect it (he mentions Maharashtra, for example). But what social science theories can explain the “full” variation in an outcome? Mukherjee appears to suggest that his theory can do so—that colonial indirect rule is a necessary and sufficient cause of Maoist violence (he initially states that colonial indirect rule is necessary but not sufficient, but in a footnote on p. 11 he notes that the deviant cases in the book, on closer inspection, confirm his theory). But the language of necessary/sufficient causes is based on mathematical logic, and much of Mukherjee’s evidence is statistical, which is based on probability theory. Furthermore, necessary and sufficient causes are “rare or nonexistent in the social sciences” (Mahoney, Kimball, and Koivu, “The Logic of Historical Explanation in the Social Sciences,” Comparative Political Studies 42 [1], 2009), so it would be surprising to see it here.
On the empirical side, the statistical analyses are quite sophisticated, especially in the case study chapters, but Mukherjee’s data for the national-level regressions (chapter 5) focus mostly on the period from 2003–5. Mukherjee notes that he is looking at the “initial areas of rebel control,” but the rebellion began in 1967. The data, which come from the Indian government, also only record 55 of 600 districts controlled by Maoist rebels from 2003–5. Considering the massive reach of the long-running Maoist insurgency, this dataset is a very truncated temporal and geographical sample. And this is not due to a lack of data: there are good national-level conflict data going back to 1967 (Chandra and García-Ponce, “Why Ethnic Subaltern-Led Parties Crowd out Armed Organizations: Explaining Maoist Violence in India,” World Politics 71 [2], 2019) or the 1980s (Gomes, “The Political Economy of the Maoist Conflict in India: An Empirical Analysis,” World Development 68, 2015, which compiles four different datasets) that Mukherjee cites but does not use. Would his findings hold over a larger sample?
Overall, Colonial Institutions and Civil War offers a historical perspective on the origins of India’s deadly Maoist insurgency, which Mukherjee notes is currently dormant but has previously occurred in waves. The book is a mixed contribution in terms of concepts and theory, but its multimethod approach, especially the fieldwork and data collection in conflict zones, still makes this a useful addition to the study of colonialism and civil war.
