44 SOCIAL SCIENTIST The fact which is surprising and disappointing is that representatives of the tendency should refuse to come to grip with the issues rasied by the nationalist and Marxist writers, through the simple expedient of ignoring these issues altogether. The reader will search in vain in the index for any entry under 'deidustrialisation', or even 'handicrafts, decline of; he will find nothing under 'drain of wealth/ or 'unilateral transfer'. In the more than one thousand pages of text, there is in fact no discussion of the 'dcindustrialisation' issue at all, though one would have thought that the section on 'occupational structure' would have been the logical place to make some reference to it. Morris D Morris in his paper on the growth of large-scale industry. puts forward the same sweeping generalisations he made a quarter of a century ago, on yarn imports improving the compititive position of Indian weavers, and large-scale industry compensating for handicrafts, without any reference to subsequent research contradicting these views (such as Meghnad Desai's estimate of the required productvity rise in weaving, or Bagchi's and Ghattopadhyaya's work on the impact of decline in manufacturing). Nor is there any discussion anywhere in the volume, of the drain of wealth from India to Britain; the only paper which refers tangentially to it, by K N Chaudhuri on 'Foreign Trade and the Balance of Payments', says dismiss! vely, (< . the issues raised by the drain controversy will be discussed elsewhere". Alas, the promise remains unfulfilled; it is not in fact discussed anywhere. The ogranic links between the internal collection of revenues, commeriali-sation, and outflow of income, are neither mentioned nor discussed by any author. The phenomenon of two centuries of British rule over India thus remains without any discernible rationale, if we are to confine ourselves to the discussion in ihe CEHI. The biggest lacuna is with respect to the treatment of the Indian people: The phenomenon of a large-scale growth of landlessness and agricultural labour, tribal dispossession and tribal and peasant revolts, 'are evidently not considired important enough to merit any discussion by the CEHI, The competent writing of history, whether from a right-wing and pro-imperialist, or from a left-wing and anti-imperialist point of view, must be engage'- it must take on its opponents in a spirit of serious scholarship and try to refute their arguments on the planes of fact and logic. Intellectual credibility cannot be retained if a particular point of view is sought to be established by simply ignoring all inconvenient evidence to the contrary, by suppressing reference to all research whose results do not fit into that particular point of view. The bibliography reflects the poverty of treatment: it is woefully inadequate, even with respect to the pro-imperialist view itself. There is no reference to Vera Anstey or Theodore Morrision; accounts of colonial administrators throwing light on the condition of the masses, such as W W Hunter's book on a famine warning system for Bengal; or M L Darling's several books on Punjab, find no mention. This is despite