66 SOCIAL SCIENTIST any sign of vigour, a number of inflexibilities relating to its asset and liability management crippling it all the way. The two parts of Bagchi's book proceed through this sequence of events like a slow motion film, turning the page of the Presidency Bank documents sometimes even day by day. The documents are mostly the minutes of the board meetings, loan registers, balance statements and various official communications. Sometimes use is made of material and documents outside the banking sphere to trace the antecedents of bank clients and constituents-occasions when a flavour of nineteenth century Indian society heightens the feel of history in the ongoing documentation. The narrative thus is a ringside view of the evolution of the three banks as it was unfolding through the agency of the most immediate actors-the banks, the government and the men of commerce. This very close documentation has been carried out mostly without the author's intervention as a commentator who tries to put a construction on the passing events, except on occasions when the author's indignation at the evidence of racial discrimination becomes visible in his narration. Thus, while the book certainly gives the reader access to the benefits of a very close scrutiny of facts, the disadvantages of looking at history at the level of agents also becomes apparent. Micro-level agents tend to dominate as shaping history, while the fact that they may in turn be the mere projections of bigger historical forces tends to be obliterated. One presumes that an economic historian of Bagchi's stature is well aware of this rather commonplace observation, and would hold that the so-called bigger forces often tend to spring out of the historian's own upbringing and consciousness, unless the facts of the situation are first meticulously unearthed. It seems fair to endorse such a position and hope that an attempt would be made in future to use the mine of information unearthed in these volumes to construct a stylized history, admittedly of a lower truth content-not what happened but how it all happened-if only to cater to the curiosity of the less initiated and more impatient layman. This interjection should n^t create the impression that the author does not help us with some perspectives to the foreground of events. He has several chapters (Chapters 1, 8, 20, 21, 22 and 31) which are essentially written to save the reader from the bewildering details of events and to provide perspectives in which to view the documentation. These eminently readable chapters based only partly on the material documented in the rest of the book mostly pass on to the readers the benefit of the insight of an accomplished historian that the author is, from his earlier research. What still remains awaited is a distillation of the findings documented in the book, as we mentioned earlier. The documents and discussions in the book most certainly have opened up valuable material with which we can test and enrich some of our existing ideas of the evolution of our banking system. First of all,