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Offering an interpretation of one of the 20th century's most extraordinary personalities, this book shows how Gandhi's religious beliefs, political career & personal behaviour form a coherent whole. It examines Gandhi's ideas about the relationship between sexual control & power, & the bizarre behaviour that resulted.
Examines the origins and effects of the imperial ethos. The book traces the careers of esteemed imperial figures and shows how they sought to inspire an obedience in the colonized based not merely on duty but on love. The result was a strange mixture of hypocrisy and racism.
What is it about Arabia and her people that has exercised such a powerful allure on generations of English travellers and explorers? ""A land whose name could evoke haunting echoes of the unconscious ... a country of the mind more real than any place on a map"" had, by the Victorian era, become a deep and lasting obsession for some of the greatest writers and explorers of the time. Here are the stories of some of those men, iconic figures like T.E. Lawrence and Richard Burton, whose extraordinary relationships with and explorations of Arabia changed the way we now perceive the Arab world and formed the basis of the West’s understanding of the region. Riveting and beautifully-portrayed, Heart Beguiling Araby reveals how these ultimately lonely figures pushed themselves to the limits of physical and mental endurance, surviving and prevailing in a land that had captivated them, thus binding their legends to its sweeping deserts and ancient tribes for generations to come.
A biography detailing Gandhi’s twenty-year stay in South Africa and his attitudes and behavior in the nation’s political context. In the pantheon of freedom fighters, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi has pride of place. His fame and influence extend far beyond India and are nowhere more significant than in South Africa. “India gave us a Mohandas, we gave them a Mahatma,” goes a popular South African refrain. Contemporary South African leaders, including Mandela, have consistently lauded him as being part of the epic battle to defeat the racist white regime. The South African Gandhi focuses on Gandhi’s first leadership experiences and the complicated man they reveal—a man who actually s...
The historiography of modern India is largely a pageant of presumed virtues: harmonious territorial unity, religious impartiality, the miraculous survival of electoral norms in the world’s most populous democracy. Even critics of Indian society still underwrite such claims. But how well does the “Idea of India” correspond to the realities of the Union? In an iconoclastic intervention, Marxist historian Perry Anderson provides an unforgettable reading of the Subcontinent’s passage through Independence and the catastrophe of Partition, the idiosyncratic and corrosive vanities of Gandhi and Nehru, and the close interrelationship of Indian democracy and caste inequality. The Indian Ideology caused uproar on first publication in 2012, not least for breaking with euphemisms for Delhi’s occupation of Kashmir. This new, expanded edition includes the author’s reply to his critics, an interview with the Indian weekly Outlook, and a postscript on India under the rule of Narendra Modi.
Success is all very well, but failure teaches us what is most important: humility. Costica Bradatan tells the stories of four thinkers who, for all their external success, courted failure throughout their years. From Simone Weil to Seneca and Gandhi, the greatest of us made meaningful lives by grasping the epiphanies of failure.
Culture, Empire, and the Question of Being Modern explores the problematic formation of national culture within modern English society. In this ambitious work of post-colonial and cultural theory, C. J. Wan-ling Wee investigates the complex interaction between a modern, industrialized, metropolitan, and progressively rational English national culture and a nationalistic imperial discourse interested in territorial expansion and the valorization of an idealized agrarian past. Starting with the Victorian era, the work documents the complex relationship of concepts such as 'home' and 'frontier' and 'EnglishO and 'colonial' through an analysis of key literary-cultural figures in their historical contexts: Rudyard Kipling, Charles Kingsley, T.S. Eliot, and V.S. Naipaul. Wee brings the discussion of modernity into the present with a consideration of post-imperial Singapore--a neo-traditionalist modern society that reworks many of the colonial tropes and contradictions--to investigate the ambiguities and contradictions revealed in the West's engagement with modernity.
In this ground-breaking authoritative study, a highly documented and incisive analysis is made of the galvanising changes wrought to the people and landscape of British Mandated Palestine (1929-1948). Using a comprehensive and interdisciplinary approach, the book’s award-winning author examines how the British imposed their rule, dominated by the clashing dualities of their Mandate obligations towards the Arabs and the Jews, and their own interests. The rulers’ Empire-wide conceptions of the ‘White man’s burden’ and preconceptions of the Holy Land were potent forces of change, influencing their policies. Lucidly written, Mandated Landscape is also a rich source of information suppo...
At its zenith in the early twentieth century, the British Empire ruled nearly one-quarter of the world’s inhabitants. As they worked to exercise power in diverse and distant cultures, British authorities relied to a surprising degree on the science of mind. Ruling Minds explores how psychology opened up new possibilities for governing the empire. From the mental testing of workers and soldiers to the use of psychoanalysis in development plans and counterinsurgency strategy, psychology provided tools for measuring and managing the minds of imperial subjects. But it also led to unintended consequences. Following researchers, missionaries, and officials to the far corners of the globe, Erik L...
In the seventeenth century the English were often depicted as a nation of barbarians, fanatics, and king-killers. Two hundred years later they were more likely to be seen as the triumphant possessors of a unique political stability, vigorous industrial revolution, and a world-wide empire. These may have been British achievements; but the virtues which brought about this transformation tended to be perceived as specifically English. Ideas of what constituted Englishness changed from a stock notion of waywardness and unpredictability to one of discipline and dedication. The evolution of the so-called national character - today once more the subject of scrutiny and debate - is traced through the impressions and analyses of foreign observers, and related to English ambitions and anxieties during a period of intense change.