| Abstract: | This article advances a theory of societal change I am developing: rather than the usual pseudo‐evolutionary view which presents each phase of societal change as supplanting its predecessor, I argue that societal change is accumulative in character and that in this process of accumulation chance may play a part. In the first part of the article, using the historically important example of the British rise to paramountcy in Gujarat (now a state in northern India) as a case study, I show that the interventions of chance in this historical episode is undeniable. In the second part, I examine the contemporaneous reactions of historians and others to the British rise to paramountcy and their suppression of chance, then I examine key reasons why chance became obscured in sociological writings and in most present‐day evolutionary biological studies of human behaviour. I argue that there is no single, uniform essence of chanciness, that chance events bear a family resemblance, and that the Gujarati case study permits the identification of several sibling forms, two of which are theoretically illuminated, with some qualifications, by the writings of Raymond Boudon and Jared Diamond. I conclude that while there is more theoretical work required to distinguish and accommodate other forms of chance, nonetheless, it is time chance was rehabilitated because its readmittance into the disciplinary fold will not exclude sociological explanations, but it will help to avoid the unsavoury consequences of neglecting the topic whose exclusion is both empirically and theoretically unjustified. |
