Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Founding an Empire on India's North-eastern Frontiers, 1790-1840
Moving away from the subcontinental Indian mainland to the varied social ecologies of Sylhet, Cachar, Manipur, Jaintia, and Khasi Hills, this study offers a much-needed reframing of regional histories of South Asia. It explores the unsettled half-century from the 1790s to the 1830s when the British East India Company, in its attempt to control commercial trade routes connecting India, Burma, and China, strove to establish a colonial administration over the north-eastern frontiers. A region where the river courses shifted and cultivated fields turned into lakes in the monsoons, and seasonal changes required highly flexible and varied livelihood strategies, the East India Company stepped into the shoes of the existing Mughal administration with great difficulty. The book explores both the enabling and constraining conditions of climate and ecology to understand the role of daily administration in shaping subject formation. Challenging the conventional understanding of the founding of the colonial state in India, it reconnects histories of space and polities to provide rare insights into the lesser-known formative years of the East India Company rule.
The Imperial Underbelly
"The volume introduces a new analysis of interconnected labour and economic history of colonial India and Scandinavia. From a recently found archive of a railway contractor's private and business papers, the studies revise both Indian labour history and Scandinavian modern history, and ties south Sweden into the British Empire. With deep insights into everyday work practices of Indian and European contractors and manual labourers, the book establishes a bridge across the globe, between two poor regions as sites of extraction and industrial transformation, resulting from global migration and capital flows. Drawing on rich archival sources such as the Joseph Stephens Archive, Maharashtra State...
Ecological Nationalisms
The works presented in this collection take environmental scholarship in South Asia into novel territory by exploring how questions of national identity become entangled with environmental concerns in Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and India. The essays provide insight into the motivations of colonial and national governments in controlling or managing nature, and bring into fresh perspective the different kinds of regional political conflicts that invoke nationalist sentiment through claims on nature. In doing all this, the volume also offers new ways to think about nationalism and, more specifically, nationalism in South Asia from the vantage point of interdisciplinary environmental studies....
At Nature’s Edge
In an epoch when environmental issues make the headlines, this is a work that goes beyond the everyday. Ecologies as diverse as the Himalayas and the Indian Ocean coast, the Negev desert and the former military bases of Vietnam, or the Namib desert and the east African savannah all have in common a long-time human presence and the many ways people have modified nature. With research covering countries from Asia, Africa, and Australia, the authors come together to ask how and why human impacts on nature have grown in scale and pace from a long pre-history. The chapters in this volume illumine specific patterns and responses across time, going beyond an overt centring of the European experience. The tapestry of life and the human reshaping of environments evoke both concern and hope, making it vital to understand when, why, and how we came to this particular turn in the road. Eschewing easy labels and questioning eurocentrism in today’s climate vocabulary, this is a volume that will stimulate rethinking among scholars and citizens alike.
Land Conflicts Across Frontiers
Land Conflicts Across Frontiers compares Myanmar’s journey with North East India on the critical and contested issue of land. It examines concerns related to land in pre-colonial and colonial history, causes and consequences of land conflicts today, the socioeconomic dynamics attached to land, along with attempted community-based institutional interventions and rural activism. As Myanmar takes its steps towards a democratic future, it becomes critical for the country to be aware of North East India’s experiences, as they could provide valuable lessons of what to ‘implement’ and what to ‘avoid’. Loss of common property resources, non-recognition of customary rights, ambiguous land laws and inadequate attention to people’s grievances have led to a rural landscape which has witnessed livelihood vulnerability, displacement and conflict. The book not only tries to capture cross-border experiences in order to have a better understanding of land alienation, agrarian discontent and peripheral marginalization but also notes recent trends in rural spaces and suggests policy measures.
Landscapes and the Law
Landscapes and the Law is situated at the crossroads of environmental, colonial, and legal history. It examines the role of law in consolidating early colonial rule from the perspective of people’s access to nature in forests and hill tracts. This major interdisciplinary study is thus concerned with the social history of legal processes and the making of law, being as relevant today as it was when first published a decade ago. The book is focused equally on the multitude of colliding claims for access to land and resources, and the complex ways in which customary rights are redefined and codified for the purpose of securing and legitimizing colonial sovereign rule. Basing her archival and ...
Bonds Lost
Based On A Variety Of Government And Mission Sources And Actual Field Work, The Author Analyses The Changing Agrarian And Social Relations And Mobilisation Among Scheduled Caste Agricultural Labourers In The Highlands In Western Tamil Nadu Between C. 1900 And 1970.
Placing the Frontier in British North-East India
The book is a study of the travels of colonial law into the North-East frontier of the British Empire in India. Focusing on the nineteenth century, it examines the relationship of law and space, and indigenous place-making. Inhabitants of the frontier hills examined in this book were not defined as British subjects, yet they were incorporated within the colonial legal framework. The work examines the nature of this legal limbo that produced both the hills and their inhabitants as interruptions but equally as integral to the imperial project. Through a study of place-making by indigenous inhabitants of the frontier, it further demonstrates the heterogeneous narratives of self and belonging found in sites of orality and kinship that shape the hills in the present day.
The Long Conquest
This book is an enquiry into the elision of the figure of the sovereign, cotton-producing Garo in the colonial archive and its savage transformation into imperialism’s quintessential ‘primitive’ in the period between 1760 CE and 1900 CE. The precolonial political economy of hill cotton produced by the Garos, its unhinging from the exercise of Garo sovereignty and its eventual commodification twined with the deterritorialization of the community as it made way for elephant mehals and reserved forests form the kernel of the book. This history is seen as participating in and mirroring analogous processes of colonization across vast contiguous swathes of India, including Mymensingh, Chitta...
The Routledge History of Food
The history of food is one of the fastest growing areas of historical investigation, incorporating methods and theories from cultural, social, and women’s history while forging a unique perspective on the past. The Routledge History of Food takes a global approach to this topic, focusing on the period from 1500 to the present day. Arranged chronologically, this title contains 17 originally commissioned chapters by experts in food history or related topics. Each chapter focuses on a particular theme, idea or issue in the history of food. The case studies discussed in these essays illuminate the more general trends of the period, providing the reader with insight into the large-scale and dra...
