Colonial Institutions and Civil War is a book that needed to be written. As its author, Shivaji Mukherjee, writes in his acknowledgments, even a cursory look at maps of Maoist insurgency and British colonial rule in India suggests a pattern: Maoist insurgency appears to overlap with the areas where the British exercised indirect colonial rule. Surely colonial practices helped to set the stage for rebellion-triggering ethnic divisions and inequality in independent India. This idea motivated Mukherjee's dissertation project, and it is explored convincingly in the book, which is a product of painstaking research and methodological rigor. An homage to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson's “The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development,” the book contributes to the scholarship on civil war, colonial legacies, and South Asian security.
Mukherjee seeks to explain the puzzling spatial variation in—rather than temporal, behavioral, or ideological patterns of—the Maoist (or “Naxalite”) movement in India. The...
