96 SOCIAL SCIENTIST helped to develop, and more significantly, control educational and cultural facilities and the learned professions/*1 All this is correct but woefullv incomplete as a statement of the influence of British rule, particularly in Madras. The government was an oriental despotism whose real masnad lay in London, and the direction of whose activities was always outward. Its ^redistributivc" activities in Washbrook's period were the minimum necessary to extract the surplus successfully. Furthermore^ this alien government had alien collaborators., the European managing agencv houses and trading companies, in the task. As a further twist to the situation, the activities of the British government in Ceylon, Burma and Malaya opened up many opportunities for trade, moneylending and finance to groups whose avenues of advancement in India were blocked at every turn by the British government and European traders. Both Wash-brook and Baker miss the implications of all these interconnections in their analysis of the possibilities open to the upper class Indian who entered "politics" in their sense (that is, those who participated, or trieA to participate, in some recognized organ of government at the dKsti^iet, tewn or provincial level). Naturally, since they do not trace out the fiontier of possibilities, they cannot give a full account of its Shifts or of the behaviour of the Indians who were cither pushing the frontier out or, more usually, taking advantage of its outward movement. Washbrook points to the gradual evolution of local government machinery and of Indian participation in provincial and local government machinery as a factor promoting the growth of provincial politics in Madras. What he fails to note, however, is that much of the so called decentralization of government arose from the financial problems of the Government of India and the provincial governments.The Indian government gicatly increased the public debt, first by passing on to the dicCe^d Indian populace the full cost of crushing the aborted revolution of 1857, and then by embarking on a grandiose scheme of railway construction, much of which was frankly recognized to be unprofitable and dictated by military needs. The method of financing this construction further increased its costs, and the railway system imposed a huge drain on the public exchequer until the end of the nineteenth century. At the same time, the government tried to pass on the task of constructing branch railway lines and roads to district and Ideal boards of all kinds This at once increased the taxation of the local Indian population, while the beneficiaries were often European planters and traders. Many of the latter effectively controlled district boards &nd municipal administration* While this kind of imposition was occurring at the level of lacsil laixes and expenditure, at the central level, from the late 1870s onwards, the Government of India was foregoing a major source of revenue, namely customs duties.for the sake of the policy of ^one-way free trade" which benefited the exporters of British goods to India and their collaborators. The sharp and steady deterioration of the rupee-sterling