Communication and Colonialism in Eastern India

by Nitin Sinha
Communication and Colonialism in Eastern India
Author: Nitin Sinha
Publisher: Anthem Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2014-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1783083115
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Through a regional focus on Bihar between the 1760s and 1880s, ‘Communication and Colonialism in Eastern India’ reveals the shifting and contradictory nature of the colonial state’s policies and discourses on communication. The volume explores the changing relationship between trade, transport and mobility in India, as evident in the trading and mercantile networks operating at various scales of the economy. Of crucial importance to this study are the ways in which knowledge about roads and routes was collected through practices of travel, tours, surveys, and map-making, all of which benefited the state in its attempts to structure a regime that would regulate ‘undesirable’ forms of mobility.

Modern Practices in North East India

by Lipokmar Dzüvichü
Modern Practices in North East India
Author: Lipokmar Dzüvichü
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2017-11-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351271342
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This book brings together essays on North East India from across disciplines to explore new understandings of the colonial and contemporary realities of the region. Departing from the usual focus on identity and politics, it offers fresh representations from history, social anthropology, culture, literature, politics, performance and gender. Through the lens of modern practices, the essays in this volume engage with diverse issues, including state-making practices, knowledge production and its politics, history writing, colonialism, role of capital, institutions, changing locations of orality and modernity, production and reception of texts, performances and literatures, social change and memory, violence and gender relations, along with their wider historical, geographical and ideational mappings. In the process, they illustrate how the specificities of the region can become useful sites to interrogate global phenomena and processes — for instance, in what ways ideas and practices of modernity played an important role in framing the region and its people. Further, the volume underlines the complex ways in which the past came to be imagined, produced and contested in the region. With its blend of inter-disciplinary approach, analytical models and perspectives, this book will be useful to scholars, researchers and general readers interested in North East India and those working on history, frontiers and borderlands, gender, cultural studies and literature.

The Chaos of Empire

by Jon Wilson
The Chaos of Empire
Author: Jon Wilson
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Total Pages: 586
Release: 2016-10-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 1610392949
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The popular image of the British Raj-an era of efficient but officious governors, sycophantic local functionaries, doting amahs, blisteringly hot days and torrid nights-chronicled by Forster and Kipling is a glamorous, nostalgic, but entirely fictitious. In this dramatic revisionist history, Jon Wilson upends the carefully sanitized image of unity, order, and success to reveal an empire rooted far more in violence than in virtue, far more in chaos than in control. Through the lives of administrators, soldiers, and subjects-both British and Indian-The Chaos of Empire traces Britain's imperial rule from the East India Company's first transactions in the 1600s to Indian Independence in 1947. The Raj was the most public demonstration of a state's ability to project power far from home, and its perceived success was used to justify interventions around the world in the years that followed. But the Raj's institutions-from law courts to railway lines-were designed to protect British power without benefiting the people they ruled. This self-serving and careless governance resulted in an impoverished people and a stifled society, not a glorious Indian empire. Jon Wilson's new portrait of a much-mythologized era finally and convincingly proves that the story of benign British triumph was a carefully concocted fiction, here thoroughly and totally debunked.

Tracks of Change

by Ritika Prasad
Tracks of Change
Author: Ritika Prasad
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2016-05-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1316033619
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From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, railways became increasingly important in the lives of a growing number of Indians. While allowing millions to collectively experience the endemic discomforts of third-class travel, the public opportunities for proximity and contact created by railways simultaneously compelled colonial society to confront questions about exclusion, difference, and community. It was not only passengers, however, who were affected by the transformations that railways wrought. Even without boarding a train, one could see railway tracks and embankments reshaping familiar landscapes, realise that train schedules represented new temporal structures, fear that spreading railway links increased the reach of contagion, and participate in new forms of popular politics focused around railway spaces. Tracks of Change explores how railway technology, travel, and infrastructure became increasingly woven into everyday life in colonial India, how people negotiated with the growing presence of railways, and how this process has shaped India's history.

Imperial Technology and 'Native' Agency

by Aparajita Mukhopadhyay
Imperial Technology and 'Native' Agency
Author: Aparajita Mukhopadhyay
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 429
Release: 2018-05-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1315397080
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This book explores the impact of railways on colonial Indian society from the commencement of railway operations in the mid-nineteenth to the early decades of the twentieth century. The book represents a historiographical departure. Using new archival evidence as well as travelogues written by Indian railway travellers in Bengali and Hindi, this book suggests that the impact of railways on colonial Indian society were more heterogeneous and complex than anticipated either by India’s colonial railway builders or currently assumed by post-colonial scholars. At a related level, the book argues that this complex outcome of the impact of railways on colonial Indian society was a product of the interaction between the colonial context of technology transfer and the Indian railway passengers who mediated this process at an everyday level. In other words, this book claims that the colonised ‘natives’ were not bystanders in this process of imposition of an imperial technology from above. On the contrary, Indians, both as railway passengers and otherwise influenced the nature and the direction of the impact of an oft-celebrated ‘tool of Empire’. The historiographical departures suggested in the book are based on examining railway spaces as social spaces – a methodological index influenced by Henri Lefebvre’s idea of social spaces as means of control, domination and power.

Routledge Handbook of the History of Colonialism in South Asia

by Harald Fischer-Tiné
Routledge Handbook of the History of Colonialism in South Asia
Author: Harald Fischer-Tiné
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 697
Release: 2021-09-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0429774699
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The Routledge Handbook of the History of Colonialism in South Asia provides a comprehensive overview of the historiographical specialisation and sophistication of the history of colonialism in South Asia. It explores the classic works of earlier generations of historians and offers an introduction to the rapid and multifaceted development of historical research on colonial South Asia since the 1990s. Covering economic history, political history, and social history and offering insights from other disciplines and ‘turns’ within the mainstream of history, the handbook is structured in six parts: Overarching Themes and Debates The World of Economy and Labour Creating and Keeping Order: Science, Race, Religion, Law, and Education Environment and Space Culture, Media, and the Everyday Colonial South Asia in the World The editors have assembled a group of leading international scholars of South Asian history and related disciplines to introduce a broad readership into the respective subfields and research topics. Designed to serve as a comprehensive and nuanced yet readable introduction to the vast field of the history of colonialism in the Indian subcontinent, the handbook will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of South Asian history, imperial and colonial history, and global and world history.

A New Economic History of Colonial India

by Latika Chaudhary
A New Economic History of Colonial India
Author: Latika Chaudhary
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2015-08-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317674332
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A New Economic History of Colonial India provides a new perspective on Indian economic history. Using economic theory and quantitative methods, it shows how the discipline is being redefined and how new scholarship on India is beginning to embrace and make use of concepts from the larger field of global economic history and economics. The book discusses the impact of property rights, the standard of living, the labour market and the aftermath of the Partition. It also addresses how education and work changed, and provides a rethinking of traditional topics including de-industrialization, industrialization, railways, balance of payments, and the East India Company. Written in an accessible way, the contributors – all leading experts in their fields – firmly place Indian history in the context of world history. An up-to-date critical survey and novel resource on Indian Economic History, this book will be useful for undergraduate and postgraduate courses on Economic History, Indian and South Asian Studies, Economics and Comparative and Global History.

Agrarian Development in Colonial India

by Peter Robb
Agrarian Development in Colonial India
Author: Peter Robb
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2021-07-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000408116
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This book looks at agriculture, development, poverty and British rule in India, especially in the Patna Division in Bihar between c.1870–1920. It traces the economic influence of British policies and maps the impact of legal, administrative and scientific interventions to rural conditions and norms in the state. The book discusses British theories and policies of ‘improvement’, comparing them with Bihar’s agricultural practice and socio-economic conditions to draw conclusions about rural impoverishment. Following on from his earlier book, Ancient Rights and Future Comfort on the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885, the author also presents case studies on famines, debts, canal and village irrigation, flood-protection and the cultivation and production of indigo, opium and sugar. He analyses extensive archival material to reflect on property law, scientific interventions, cropping patterns, trade and intermediaries. He examines the economic role of governments, Eurocentric development theories and the complex impact of development policy on agriculture and society in Bihar. The book will be of interest to academics and students of colonial history, modern Indian history, agrarian studies, economic history, sociology, and development studies. It will also be useful to development practitioners and researchers working on the history of agrarian conditions and public policy.

The Railways in Colonial South Asia

by Ganeswar Nayak
The Railways in Colonial South Asia
Author: Ganeswar Nayak
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2021-06-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 100042748X
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This book is an interesting collection of essays on the Railways in Colonial South Asia. The book introduces the key concepts which have now entered the study of railway history, e.g. economy, ecology, culture, health and crime through the various essays. The well researched essays include those on the Imperial Railways in nineteenth century South Asia, Pakistan Railway, Impact of railway expansion on the Himalayan forests, development of the Sri Lankan Railways, a study of the European employees of the BB & CI Railways, problems of Indian Railway up to c. ad 1900, railways in Gujarati literature and tradition, mapping the Gaikwad Baroda State Railway on the colonial rail network, coming of railways in Bihar, expansion of railway to colonial Orissa, etc. This book will be of immense value to those researching on various dimensions of railway transport in colonial South Asia. It can also be read by the more perceptive general reader exploring books on railways. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.