British colonialism resolved India’s eighteenth-century crisis without a revolution

Evidence

Now, it is obviously true that colonialism did not bring us a revolution. What it brought us was, precisely, a non-revolutionary and retrograde resolution to a crisis of our own society which had come to express itself, by the eighteenth century, in a real stagnation of technologies and productivities, as well as regional and dynastic wars so constant and ruinous as to make impossible a viable coalition against the encroaching colonial power. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 436

Categorization

• SEED: A counterpoint to the ‘unconscious tool of history’ reading: the colonial outcome was retrograde, not revolutionary — a framing that undercuts the standard quotation.