Grass in their Mouths: The Upper Doab of India under the Company's Magna Charta, 1793-1830

Grass in their Mouths: The Upper Doab of India under the Company's Magna Charta, 1793-1830 PDF Author: Dirk H.A. Kolff
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004188029
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 662

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Book Description
Scholarship on the pre-Bentinck period of Indian history has taken little notice of the inevitable dilemmas of colonial rule as they became visible in the districts. This book argues that the disdain the eighteenth-century Westminster parliaments expressed both for Indians and the East India Company induced the Bengal civil service to formulate for itself a corporate identity that, because of its distant and self-centered character, prevented it to acquire an executive hold on most levels of the Indian administration. The core of the book consists of superbly-detailed studies of the ways in which, in the Ganges-Jumna doab, villagers, revenue farmers, Indian policemen and revenue officials, bankers and judges struggled to overcome or profit from this feature of the colonial administration.

Grass in their Mouths: The Upper Doab of India under the Company's Magna Charta, 1793-1830

Grass in their Mouths: The Upper Doab of India under the Company's Magna Charta, 1793-1830 PDF Author: Dirk H.A. Kolff
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004188029
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 662

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Book Description
Scholarship on the pre-Bentinck period of Indian history has taken little notice of the inevitable dilemmas of colonial rule as they became visible in the districts. This book argues that the disdain the eighteenth-century Westminster parliaments expressed both for Indians and the East India Company induced the Bengal civil service to formulate for itself a corporate identity that, because of its distant and self-centered character, prevented it to acquire an executive hold on most levels of the Indian administration. The core of the book consists of superbly-detailed studies of the ways in which, in the Ganges-Jumna doab, villagers, revenue farmers, Indian policemen and revenue officials, bankers and judges struggled to overcome or profit from this feature of the colonial administration.

Cooperation and Empire

Cooperation and Empire PDF Author: Tanja Bührer
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 178533610X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
While the study of “indigenous intermediaries” is today the focus of some of the most interesting research in the historiography of colonialism, its roots extend back to at least the 1970s. The contributions to this volume revisit Ronald E. Robinson’s theory of collaboration in a range of historical contexts by melding it with theoretical perspectives derived from postcolonial studies and transnational history. In case studies ranging globally over the course of four centuries, these essays offer nuanced explorations of the varied, complex interactions between imperial and local actors, with particular attention to those shifting and ambivalent roles that transcend simple binaries of colonizer and colonized.

Empires of Complaints

Empires of Complaints PDF Author: Robert Travers
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009123386
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Travers explores how Mughal political and legal culture shaped and was reshaped by the British colonial state in Bengal.

F.D. Ascoli

F.D. Ascoli PDF Author: Ananda Bhattacharyya
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000023370
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Early Revenue History of Bengal and the Fifth Report, 1812 was the outcome of a series of four lectures delivered at the Dacca College by the distinguished Bengali civil servant, F.D. Ascoli. It embodies the text of the Fifth Report on the affairs of the East India Company by the Select Committee of the House of Commons, appointed with a view to form the charter of 1813, and also careful and detailed summary of the discussions that led up to Lord Cornwallis's Permanent Revenue Settlement of Bengal (including Behar). The condensed arguments of Mr. James Grant, Sir John Shore and Lord Cornwallis on the subject of the Permanent Settlement enable us to see the objectives desired for in the Permanent Revenue Settlement. The book also affords valuable glimpses on the methods adopted for carrying out the settlement and working it successfully in the early days when the zamindars themselves did not look upon it as a boon, and the sale of estates for arrears were frequent. Ascoli's excellent and dispassionate account of the Company’s difficulties and the unsuccessful remedies that were from time to time applied to meet them, disposes of pet theories that are sometimes advanced with regard to the Permanent Settlement. Mr. Ascoli's masterly analysis and partial text of the Fifth Report from the Select Committee, 1812, will be of material assistance to students of revenue history in Bengal and of Colonial India generally. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka

The Specter of Peace

The Specter of Peace PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004371680
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Specter of Peace advances a novel historical conceptualization of peace as a process of “right ordering” that involved the careful regulation of violence, the legitimation of colonial authority, and the creation of racial and gendered hierarchies. The volume highlights the many paths of peacemaking that otherwise have hitherto gone unexplored in early American and Atlantic World scholarship and challenges historians to take peace as seriously as violence. Early American peacemaking was a productive discourse of moral ordering fundamentally concerned with regulating violence. The historicization of peace, the authors argue, can sharpen our understanding of violence, empire, and the early modern struggle for order and harmony in the colonial Americas and Atlantic World. Contributors are: Micah Alpaugh, Brendan Gillis, Mark Meuwese, Margot Minardi, Geoffrey Plank, Dylan Ruediger, Cristina Soriano and Wayne E. Lee.

The Chaos of Empire

The Chaos of Empire PDF Author: Jon Wilson
Publisher: Public Affairs
ISBN: 1610392930
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 586

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Book Description
From the moment in the 1680s that the East India Company began to trade with the Mughal rulers of the port cities of Surat, Madras, Bombay, Calcutta, and Chittagong, the story of the Indian subcontinent was changed forever. Before its dissolution in 1857, the officers of the East India Company had under their command more than a quarter of a million troops, and functioned not as a trading partner but a quasi-imperial government whose monopolistic habits and trade preferments included the tax on tea that led directly to the American Revolution. On its dissolution the Times reported: "It accomplished a work such as in the whole history of the human race no other company ever attempted and as such is ever likely to attempt in the years to come." This was meant as a compliment, but it concealed a much more brutal truth. From the famine of 1770 in which one third of the people living in the state of Bengal perished to the Anglo-Mughal wars and the later brutal repression of the Anglo-Afghan Wars, the story of the British in India was one of conflict and divide-and-rule, relentlessly applied from the relative security of the world’s most powerful naval vessels and the forts they supplied. Interspersed between the major wars were numerous minor conflicts, most lost to popular histories, which underscore the continual violence of the imperial project. In The Chaos of Empire, Jon Wilson uses the everyday lives of administrators, soldiers and subjects, British and Indian, to lift the veil of empire to show how British rule really worked. Far from the orderly Raj that its officials sought to portray, British rule in conquered India was chaotic and paranoid, and led to a succession of unstable states in South Asia and across the world. Most importantly, empire in India created a huge gap between image and reality, enabling a small number of people--a social and political elite--to project power across the world. Among its legacies were continual cycles of hubristic state enterprise followed by massive failure--up to and including the neo-imperial adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq now. Long after the end of empire, The Chaos of Empire argues that we still try to live by the myths created by the Raj. At a time when Prime Minister Narendra Modi is arguing that Britain should pay restitution for the damage done to the Indian subcontinent under British rule, this comprehensive, dynamic, and fierce history of Britain’s rule is timely, provocative, and immensely readable.

The Formation of the Colonial State in India

The Formation of the Colonial State in India PDF Author: Hayden J. Bellenoit
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1134494297
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
In the period between the 1770s and 1840s, through the process of colonial state formation, the early colonial state in India was able to harness and extract vast amounts of agrarian wealth in north India. However, little is known of the histories of the Indian scribes and the role they played in shaping the early patterns of British colonial rule. This book offers a new way of interpreting the colonial state’s origins in north India. It examines how the formation of early agrarian revenue settlements exacerbated an extant late Mughal taxation tradition, and how the success of British power was shaped by this extant paper-oriented revenue culture. It goes on to examine how the service and cultural histories of various Hindu scribal communities fit within broader changes in political administration, taxation, patterns of governance and a shared Indo-Islamic administrative culture. The author argues that British power after the late eighteenth century came as much through bureaucratic mastery, paper and taxes as it did through military force and commercial ruthlessness. The book draws upon private family papers, interviews and Persian sources to demonstrate how the fortunes of scribes changed between empires, and the important role they played at the height of the British Raj by 1900. Offering a detailed account of how agrarian wealth provided the bedrock of the colonial state’s later patterns of administration, this book is a unique and refreshing contribution to studies in South Asian History, Governance and Imperialism.

Smoke and Ashes

Smoke and Ashes PDF Author: Amitav Ghosh
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374711992
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by Foreign Policy, Literary Hub, and The Millions Ghosh unravels the impact of the opium trade on global history and in his own family―the climax of a yearslong project. When Amitav Ghosh began the research for his monumental cycle of novels the Ibis Trilogy, he was startled to learn how the lives of the nineteenth-century sailors and soldiers he wrote about were dictated not only by the currents of the Indian Ocean but also by the precious commodity carried in enormous quantities on those currents: opium. Most surprising of all, however, was the discovery that his own identity and family history were swept up in the story. Smoke and Ashes is at once a travelogue, a memoir, and an essay in history, drawing on decades of archival research. In it, Ghosh traces the transformative effect the opium trade had on Britain, India, and China, as well as the world at large. The trade was engineered by the British Empire, which exported Indian opium to sell to China to redress their great trade imbalance, and its revenues were essential to the empire’s financial survival. Following the profits further, Ghosh finds opium central to the origins of some of the world’s biggest corporations, of America’s most powerful families and prestigious institutions (from the Astors and Coolidges to the Ivy League), and of contemporary globalism itself. Moving deftly between horticultural history, the mythologies of capitalism, and the social and cultural repercussions of colonialism, in Smoke and Ashes Ghosh reveals the role that one small plant has had in making our world, now teetering on the edge of catastrophe.

Routledge Handbook of the South Asian Diaspora

Routledge Handbook of the South Asian Diaspora PDF Author: Joya Chatterji
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136018247
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Book Description
South Asia’s diaspora is among the world’s largest and most widespread, and it is growing exponentially. It is estimated that over 25 million persons of Indian descent live abroad; and many more millions have roots in other countries of the subcontinent, in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. There are 3 million South Asians in the UK and approximately the same number resides in North America. South Asians are an extremely significant presence in Southeast Asia and Africa, and increasingly visible in the Middle East. This inter-disciplinary handbook on the South Asian diaspora brings together contributions by leading scholars and rising stars on different aspects of its history, anthropology and geography, as well as its contemporary political and socio-cultural implications. The Handbook is split into five main sections, with chapters looking at mobile South Asians in the early modern world before moving on to discuss diaspora in relation to empire, nation, nation state and the neighbourhood, and globalisation and culture. Contributors highlight how South Asian diaspora has influenced politics, business, labour, marriage, family and culture. This much needed and pioneering venture provides an invaluable reference work for students, scholars and policy makers interested in South Asian Studies.

Annexation and the Unhappy Valley

Annexation and the Unhappy Valley PDF Author: Matthew A. Cook
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004293671
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Annexation and the Unhappy Valley: The Historical Anthropology of Sindh’s Colonization addresses the nineteenth century expansion and consolidation of British colonial power in the Sindh region of South Asia. It adopts an interdisciplinary approach and employs a fine-grained, nuanced and situated reading of multiple agents and their actions. It explores how the political and administrative incorporation of territory (i.e., annexation) by East India Company informs the conversion of intra-cultural distinctions into socio-historical conflicts among the colonized and colonizers. The book focuses on colonial direct rule, rather than the more commonly studied indirect rule, of South Asia. It socio-culturally explores how agents, perspectives and intentions vary—both within and across regions—to impact the actions and structures of colonial governance.