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International Relations of the Asia-Pacific
Actions, practices and historical structures: the partition of India
by Sanjoy Banerjee
Abstract
This article develops an explanation of how actions emerge in succession. It shows how the actions of a subject, linked by relations of successful precedent, form practices. These practices cause each other, in specific ways, to repeat. These interdependent practices are self-reproducing historical structures. By reproducing itself in this way, a historical structure causes characteristic, uneven trends of historical change. An account of a historical structure therefore is the specification of its practices and of the ways in which they cause each other to repeat. The article presents an empirical demonstration of the theory with the case of the political process that led to the partition of the British Indian empire into India and Pakistan. The theory presented below is more elaborate, explicit and ontologically coherent than the conceptions of historical structures in the historical sociology literature. It has direct empirical reference, unlike the metatheoretical literature.