APPROACH TO INDIAN SOCIETY 61 Hindustan is not the Italy, but the Ireland of the East."6 Not only is he clear as to the complexity of the raw material for the study of India, but he seizes on the dynamics of exploitation as the key to any such study. The character of this exploitation is gone into in an article entitled "The East India Company—Its History and Result" (June 24, 1853) where he notes that "it was under the ascendancy of that Dutch Prince when the Whigs became the farmers of the revenues of the British Empire, when the Bank of England sprung into life, when the protective system was firmly established in England, and the balance of power in Europe was definitively settled, that the existence of an East India Company was recognized by Parliament. That era of apparent liberty was in reality the era of monopolies, not created by Royal grants, as in the times of Elizabeth and Charles I, but authorized and nationalised by the sanction of Parliament. This epoch in English history bears, in fact, an extreme likeness to the epoch of Louis Philippe in France, the old landed aristocracy having been defeated, and the bourgeoisie not bsing able to take its place except under the banner of moneyocracy, or the 'haute finance'. The East India Company excluded the common people from the commerce with India, at the same time that the House of Commons excluded them from parliamentary representation. In this as well as in other instances, we find the first decisive victory of the bourgeoisie over the feudal aristocracy coinciding with the most pronounced reaction against the people, a phenomenon which has driven more than one popular writer, like Cobbett, to look for popular liberty rather in the past than in the future/'7 The significance of this approach is enormous. It links the struggle of the English "common people" with that of Indian patriots, a feature that many of our nationalist historians and "drain theory" protagonists often choose to ignore. At the same lime, there is a cautious note against "popular" interpretations of colonial history— many of which, like the "development ofunderdcvclopment" and the "colonial mode of production", even parade as Marxism today—which see only destruction, oppression and stagnation and are driven to glorifying the past at worst or accepting a miserable present at best. Marx, with the precision of a scientist, breaks through this morass of "popular" theorizing and sees the driving forces of historical progress pushing on regardless. This he brings out in an article entitled "The Future Results of the British Rule in India" (July 22, 1853): 6 Marx, "The British Rule in India", in The First Indian War of Independence, 1857-1859, 1978, p 13. (June 10, 1853). 7 Marx, "The East India Company—Its History and Results", in ibid, pp 20-21. (June 24, 1855).