APPROACH TO INDIAN SOCIETY 81 The political structure of Asiatic society also reflects this tendency, and Engels points out in the letter referred to above: "An Oriental government never had more than three departments: finance (plunder at home), war (plunder at home and abroad), and public works (provision for reproduction)."53 On such a basis, with the onset of a war, or even a major calamity, whole complexes of human settlements could be wiped out forever, once the basis of reproduction (be it the canal system, a system of tanks or whatever else) collapsed. This, and not Euro-centrism, is the basis of Marx's remark that Asiatic societies, for all their turmoil, changes of dynasty and so on? basically have no history. This is the inevitable consequence of a process of production which had evolved a high level of skill in the detail labourer without a correspondingly high technological development. However, in spite of this, their interest in this aspect of Indian society was limited to the extent of its being essential to the understanding of how colonialism established itself in India. For, they understood that "men are not free to choose their productive forces— which are the basis of all their history—for every productive force is an acquired force. ...Because of the simple fact that every succeeding generation finds itself in possession of the productive force acquired by the previous generation, and that they serve it as the raw material for new production, a coherence arises in human history, a history of humanity takes shape which becomes all the more a history of humanity the more the productive forces of men develop and therefore their social relations develop. Hence it necessarily follows that the social history of man is always the history of their individual development, whether they are conscious of it or not."54 The conclusion they came to, then, was that while the colonial government conducted plunder at home and abroad far more narrow-mindedly than any oriental despot, it failed to provide public works, so essential to Asiatic society, as a result of which it was bound to dissolve and throw the masses released from its clutches into struggles.55 The struggles would naturally be of a nature they had never seen before, as for its own purposes the colonial power had centralised the administration and created an Indian army recruited from the ryots, themselves the sufferers of the caricature of a system of land-ownership evolved by the British. They described it as follows: "By the Zemindari system the people of the Presidency of Bengal were depossessed at once of their hereditary claims to the soil, in favour of the native tax-gatherers called Zamindars. By the ryotwari system 53 Engels's letter to Marx (June 6,1853), Marx-Engels, P re-Capitalist... Formations^ p504. 54 Marx, ibid, letter to Annenkov (December 28, 1846), p 491. 55 Engels. ibid, letter to Marx (June 6, 1853), p 504.