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Imtiaz Ahmad’s edited volume constitutes a departure from an academic tradition that has related Islamic pre¬cepts to Muslim customs and practices without considering regional customs and practices that bespoke much adapta¬tion. It provides the empirical evidence that Muslims, like other religious groups, have adapted their precepts and rituals to blend with their cultural environment and with customs and practices already in vogue.

The book under review is a companion volume to A.K. Banerji’s earlier study on India’s Balance of Payments 1921-22 to 1938-39 (1963). The hindsight enjoyed by the author has enabled him to attempt the construction of a continuous time-series of India’s balance of payments relating to almost the entire period of British rule in India.

This is a book with a certain topical value but likely to be forgotten soon enough as another doctoral dissertation too hastily published. Despite Shashi Tharoor’s painstaking research, his effort is flawed by his preconceived notions and not quite redeemed by the quality of his scholarship. The thesis is outlined in the intro¬ductory chapter; the facts and the analysis that follow are simply to prove it. The book provides a lesson to students of diplomatic history how not to carry on research.

Contrary to its claim of making a comprehensive study of the problem of north-east India’s frontier tribes, the volume under review deals only with frontier-making in that region and examines the ‘forward policy’ pursued in that respect. Chronologically structured, this narrative pays little attention to the ethnolo¬gical details of the tribes con¬cerned, or to their many-sided problems, economic and social. The title of the volume is therefore somewhat misleading.

Constitutional history has long been the great ignis fatuus of the Anglo-Saxon historical tradition. In this context, it matters little that the Whigs enshrined par-liament with a halo of good¬ness, and Namier shot it down with a relentless expose of the cynicism and self-aggrandize¬ment in political motivation. What matters is that politics remained the crucial subject matter of the historian’s inquiry.