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Document Raj
Historians of British colonial rule in India have noted both the place of military might and the imposition of new cultural categories in the making of Empire, but Bhavani Raman, in Document Raj, uncovers a lesser-known story of power: the power of bureaucracy. Drawing on extensive archival research in the files of the East India Company’s administrative offices in Madras, she tells the story of a bureaucracy gone awry in a fever of documentation practices that grew ever more abstract—and the power, both economic and cultural, this created. In order to assert its legitimacy and value within the British Empire, the East India Company was diligent about record keeping. Raman shows, however...
Cultures in Motion
In the wide-ranging and innovative essays of Cultures in Motion, a dozen distinguished historians offer new conceptual vocabularies for understanding how cultures have trespassed across geography and social space. From the transformations of the meanings and practices of charity during late antiquity and the transit of medical knowledge between early modern China and Europe, to the fusion of Irish and African dance forms in early nineteenth-century New York, these essays follow a wide array of cultural practices through the lens of motion, translation, itinerancy, and exchange, extending the insights of transnational and translocal history. Cultures in Motion challenges the premise of fixed,...
Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India
The charged emotional politics of language and identity in India
Iterations of Law
This volume reflects a recent transformation of the concerns of social scientists regarding the legal history of South Asia. While, earlier, historians looked at the results rather than the performance of law, the concerns later shifted to unravelling the socioeconomic and political contexts that shaped law-making and its practice. Iterations of Law advances these new perspectives on legal history from South Asia. Going beyond an area studies rubric to critically engage with recent work in colonial and transnational legal history, the essays in this volume utilize both archival and everyday records to interrogate the relationship between the discipline of history and the institution of law. ...
Fraternal Capital
A richly textured ethnography about knitwear manufacturers in South India that explains how peasant-workers have refined notions of place, gender, and class to create a local industrial form that succeeds in the global economy.
Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta
Explores how the British Empire responded to the environmental challenges of the world's largest tidal delta.
Ethical Life in South Asia
Outgrowth of an international workshop on the subject of South Asian ethical practices held in Vancouver, Canada in September 2007.
Exile in Colonial Asia
Exile was a potent form of punishment and a catalyst for change in colonial Asia between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries. Vast networks of forced migration supplied laborers to emerging colonial settlements, while European powers banished rivals to faraway locations. Exile in Colonial Asia explores the phenomenon of exile in ten case studies by way of three categories: “kings,” royals banished as political exiles; “convicts,” the vast majority of those whose lives are explored in this volume, sent halfway across the world with often unexpected consequences; and “commemoration,” referring to the myriad ways in which the experience and its aftermath were remembered by...
The Truth Machines
Using case studies and the results of extensive fieldwork, this book considers the nature of state power and legal violence in liberal democracies by focusing on the interaction between law, science, and policing in India. The postcolonial Indian police have often been accused of using torture in both routine and exceptional criminal cases, but they, and forensic psychologists, have claimed that lie detectors, brain scans, and narcoanalysis (the use of “truth serum,” Sodium Pentothal) represent a paradigm shift away from physical torture; most state high courts in India have upheld this rationale. The Truth Machines examines the emergence and use of these three scientific techniques to a...
The Shogun's Silver Telescope
The East India Company, founded in London in 1600, was the world's biggest trading organization until the twentieth century. It was originally a spice trading organization, and its existence was precarious in its early years. But its governors soon began to think bigger. A decade after itsfoundation, they started to plan voyages to more fabulous places, notably Japan. Japan had silver, was cold in winter, and had no sheep, so was a perfect market for England's main export, woollen cloth. The Company planned to add to its spice-runs, sailing back and forth to Japan, exchanging woolfor silver. This could be done quickly and easily, over the top of Russia - or so the maps of the day suggested (...
