Description
Since its first publication, Vincent Smith's standard textbook on Indian history has been periodically revised, most comprehensively when Percival Spear edited the third edition and led the
Times Literary Supplement to comment: "It was high time that Vincent Smith's standard textbook...should be brought up to date, because the original work which went to the making of it was so solidly done that it had permanent value. Dr Spear has been given, quite rightly, a very free hand as editor; he has himself largely re-written the account of the British period. This revision...has brought into existence a book which, while recognizably that of Vincent Smith, is fully abreast both of modern historical scholarship and of modern political ideas."
In the fourth edition Percival Spear, in a new section entitled 'Independent India', carries on the account from 1947, the closing year of the third edition, up to the declaration of Emergency in 1975. The new section examines the historical, political, cultural and economic developments in post-Independence India and surveys its foreign policy in the Nehru and post-Nehru eras to present a composite view of contemporary India, the factors that have moulded it, its problems and achievements.