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.