ABSTRACT
CONTENTS 3.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................53 3.2 Evolution of Imperial Bureaucracy .......................................................................... 54 3.3 Demise of the Goal of Imperial Unity .................................................................... 58 3.4 British East India Company ....................................................................................61 3.5 Marxist and Weberian Attitudes ............................................................................. 62 References ........................................................................................................................ 63
3.1 Introduction Karl Marx and Max Weber were more or less in agreement about the irrelevance of ancient imperial bureaucracies to the modern industrial world. Max Weber in his famous essay on bureaucracy dismissed them as patrimonial or prebendal with a few asides [1]. Marx, according to one interpretation of the “Asiatic Mode of Production” (AMP) [2], regarded them as the cause of centuries long stagnation of the process of economic evolution and was happy that British colonialism in India would set in motion fundamental changes [3]. Th eir views were at least partly responsible for the lack of sociological interest in ancient bureaucracies for sometime. Attention was focused on them in the fi rst instance in a revivalist manner by nationalist historians of India, China, or Iran, who proudly unraveled the structures and processes of administration of their countries in
ancient times. Since then, some comparisons have been made: Balazs [4] felt that the study of eternally bureaucratized China will help in understanding bureaucratized communist regimes; Eisenstadt [5] regarded bureaucracy as a power group in rivalry with other groups including the sovereign-and others have challenged and criticized Weber’s concept of patrimonial bureaucracy, Marxists and neo-Marxists have produced volumes on AMP, but with no real interest in bureaucracy as such. But the subject deserves a lot more investigation, comparison, and analysis in its own right.
