Actions, practices and historical structures: the partition of India

This article develops an explanation of how actions emerge insuccession. It shows how the actions of a subject, linked byrelations of successful precedent, form practices. These practicescause each other, in specific ways, to repeat. These interdependentpractices are self-reproducing historical structures. By reproducingitself in this way, a historical structure causes characteristic,uneven trends of historical change. An account of a historicalstructure therefore is the specification of its practices andof the ways in which they cause each other to repeat. The articlepresents an empirical demonstration of the theory with the caseof the political process that led to the partition of the BritishIndian empire into India and Pakistan. The theory presentedbelow is more elaborate, explicit and ontologically coherentthan the conceptions of historical structures in the historicalsociology literature. It has direct empirical reference, unlikethe metatheoretical literature.     

Industrial location in post-reform India: patterns of inter-regional divergence and intra-regional convergence

Where do new industrial investments locate, and what factors drive the industrial location decisions? Do these investments follow the model of ‘divergence followed by convergence’ suggested by the cumulative causation, agglomeration economies, and transport-costs approaches? These questions are examined with district-level data from India for the pre- and post-reform periods using: first, tables and maps of concentration and clustering, aggregated for all industry and disaggregated into five sectors (Heavy Industries, Chemicals and Petroleum, Textiles, Agribusiness, and Utilities), and second, logistic and OLS/Heckman selection regression models for these six elements. The data provide solid evidence both of inter-regional divergence and intra-regional convergence, and suggest that ‘concentrated decentralisation’ is the appropriate framework for understanding industrial location in post-reform India.