will permit them to do more than merely survive".2. The people who migrated to Calcutta, the people who really supplied the sinews to the colonial exploitation of the country came mostly from ruined peasant homes. Or they had left their traditional trades and crafts because of a dwindling patronage in the villages and the small towns they came from. Calcutta gave them home. Calcutta made them wage-earners. Colonial Economy and the Rise of New Classes Bengal and Bihar, seized by the British earlier, had been the scene of direct exploitation of the artisans by British trading capital and, through taxation, a downright plunder of the people. It had been, here, a tragic confirmation of the fact that merchant capital, when dominant, constitutes a system of plunder. (As Marx observed, "During the whole course of the 18th century the treasures transported from India to Britain were gained much less by comparatively insignificant commerce than by direct exploitation of that country and the colossal fortunes there, exhorted and transmitted to England'^.) British capital supplanted Indian merchants and 'usurers' capital in Eastern India, which traditionally operated in trade and tax-collection on behalf of the earlier political order finally pushing it into the acquisition of landed property4. This was the beginning of absentee landlords, their irresponsible wealth, and the abysmal poverty around them. Romesh Chander Dutt described the state of commerce in the region after the conquest of Bengal in 1757 thus : "The Company's servants conveyed their goods from place to place duty-free, while the goods of the country traders were ruined."5 With this foreign predatory capital the native merchants were either ruined or survived somehow by becoming obliging agents of the East India Company. This was the beginning of the Comprador classes and the wholesale emulation of an alien culture. We saw this happening in China and Japan in the late 19th century. The later Ukiyo-e prints of the 1870s testify to the Westernisation of the Japanese artists' world view, in their themes and aesthetic judgements. In Bengal, however, communities like the Subarna Baniks—Who traditionally specialised in trade and commerce—inexplicably failed to adapt to the banking business in the eighteenth century. People from higher castes, like the Brahmans and the Kayasthas, traditionally unassociated with business, appeared as agents or assistants of British businessmen. Largely pushed out of trade and commerce, indigenous trading capital sought refuge in landed property. In a different situation it might have generated industrial capital, as it did for instance in Japan after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. In 1815, the Governor-General Moira, in a minute on the result of the Permanent Settlement in Bengal, noted almost with glee that the native merchant capital and enterprise had been diverted towards land. As a consequence to this change in economic relations, there emerged a new set of social relationships : "At the top of the social ladder was the growing group of the neo-rich, the first generation ofbabus—diwans, banias and mutsud- Journal of Arts and Ideas 7