Papers originally prepared for a seminar held at St. John's College, Cambridge, in April, 1968 under the auspices of the University Centre of South Asian Studies.

Includes bibliographical references.

1. The Mughal Mansabdari System / Percival Spear -- 2. Traditional Elites in the Great Rebellion of 1857: Some Aspects of Rural Revolt in the Upper and Central Doab / Eric Stokes -- 3. Class, Caste and Politics in Calcutta, 1815-38 / S.N. Mukherjee -- 4. Competing Elites in Bombay City Politics in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (1852-83) / Christine Dobbin -- 5. Chitpavan Brahmins and Politics in Western India in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries / Gordon Johnson -- 6. The Landed Gentry of the Telengana, Andhra Pradesh / Hugh Gray -- 7. Candidates for the 1967 General Elections in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh / Dagmar Bernstorff -- 8. M.N. Roy and Radical Humanism: The Ideology of an Indian Intellectual Elite / D.G. Dalton -- 9. The Academic Profession in India / Edward Shils -- 10. The Merchant's of Surat, c. 1700-50 / Ashin Das Gupta -- 11. European and Indian Entrepreneurship in India, 1900-30 / Amiya Kumar Bagchi.

A study of elitism particularly concerned with Indian elites in the context of British influence and its aftermath. The problems delineated are by no means peculiar to the Indian subcontinent. Nearly all the developing countries of contemporary Asia, Africa and Latin America are entangled with their post-colonial heritage and the history of political elitism in all these countries has been similar. The papers consider who were members of the elites, in the sense of 'men at the top'. They enquire how they got there, how they continued to recruit themselves and what was their relationship with the British. The contributors, sociologists, economists, anthropologists, political scientists and historians, present each other with forms of evidence which are unfamiliar and, in sum, result in a study which destroys many of the conventional clich�es of colonial historians.--Publisher description.