Peasants, Famine and the State in Colonial Western India

Peasants, Famine and the State in Colonial Western India PDF Author: D. Hall-Matthews
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230510515
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 287

Get Book Here

Book Description
Recent literature has suggested that famines are complex, long-drawn-out and political processes, rather than sudden, natural phenomena. This book is among the first to examine such a process in detail, by studying poor peasants in Ahmednagar district, Western India, between 1870 and 1884. It does so by investigating their factors of production - land, capital and labour - as well as markets in credit and the cheap foodgrains they produced and, above all, their relationship with the colonial state.

Diet for a Large Planet

Diet for a Large Planet PDF Author: Chris Otter
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226826538
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420

Get Book Here

Book Description
A history of the unsustainable modern diet—heavy in meat, wheat, and sugar—that requires more land and resources than the planet is able to support. We are facing a world food crisis of unparalleled proportions. Our reliance on unsustainable dietary choices and agricultural systems is causing problems both for human health and the health of our planet. Solutions from lab-grown food to vegan diets to strictly local food consumption are often discussed, but a central question remains: how did we get to this point? In Diet for a Large Planet, Chris Otter goes back to the late eighteenth century in Britain, where the diet heavy in meat, wheat, and sugar was developing. As Britain underwent steady growth, urbanization, industrialization, and economic expansion, the nation altered its food choices, shifting away from locally produced plant-based nutrition. This new diet, rich in animal proteins and refined carbohydrates, made people taller and stronger, but it led to new types of health problems. Its production also relied on far greater acreage than Britain itself, forcing the nation to become more dependent on global resources. Otter shows how this issue expands beyond Britain, looking at the global effects of large agro-food systems that require more resources than our planet can sustain. This comprehensive history helps us understand how the British played a significant role in making red meat, white bread, and sugar the diet of choice—linked to wealth, luxury, and power—and shows how dietary choices connect to the pressing issues of climate change and food supply.

Slavery and Bondage in Asia, 1550–1850

Slavery and Bondage in Asia, 1550–1850 PDF Author: Kate Ekama
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311077724X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book Here

Book Description
The study of slavery and coerced labour is increasingly conducted from a global perspective, and yet a dual Eurocentric bias remains: slavery primarily brings to mind the images of Atlantic chattel slavery, and most studies continue to be based – either outright or implicitly – on a model of northern European wage labour. This book constitutes an attempt to re-centre that story to Asia. With studies spanning the western Indian Ocean and the steppes of Central Asia to the islands of South East Asia and Japan, and ranging from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, this book tracks coercion in diverse forms, tracing both similarities and differences – as well as connections – between systems of coercion, from early sales regulations to post-abolition labour contracts. Deep empirical case studies, as well as comparisons between the chapters, all show that while coercion was entrenched in a number of societies, it was so in different and shifting ways. This book thus not only shows the history of slavery and coercion in Asia as a connected story, but also lays the groundwork for global studies of a phenomenon as varying, manifold and contested as coercion.

Acts of Aid

Acts of Aid PDF Author: Eleonor Marcussen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009032399
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Get Book Here

Book Description
This socio-political history on the aftermath of the 1934 Bihar–Nepal earthquake explores disaster aid, relief, and reconstruction and the questions they give rise to about class, communities and inequality. The book traces disaster responses across the twentieth century in order to demonstrate how they were embedded in political processes transcending the event of the earthquake. Aid, relief and reconstruction mirrored political agendas and ideas that articulated both changes and continuities by the colonial state, civil society and international organisations. The impact of the earthquake and aid in its wake varied widely according to social groups, ethnicity and gender in the aftermath. By studying the effects of the earthquake on communities directly affected and society, the author argues that we can come closer to an understanding of the role political, social and cultural factors held in shaping resilience to natural disasters.

The Economy of Modern India

The Economy of Modern India PDF Author: B. R. Tomlinson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316025721
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 271

Get Book Here

Book Description
Rapid economic growth has put India at the centre of current debates about the future of the global economy. In this fully revised and updated text, B. R. Tomlinson provides a comprehensive and wide-ranging account of the Indian economy over the last 150 years. He sets arguments about growth, development and underdevelopment, and the impact of imperialism, against a detailed history of agriculture, trade and manufacture, and the relations between business, the economy and the state. The new edition extends the coverage right up to the present day, and explains how one of the largest countries in the world has sought to achieve economic progress and lasting development, despite institutional weaknesses, rigid structures of political and social hierarchy, and the legacy of colonialism.

Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India

Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India PDF Author: Mytheli Sreenivas
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295748850
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 285

Get Book Here

Book Description
Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295748856 Beginning in the late nineteenth century, India played a pivotal role in global conversations about population and reproduction. In Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India, Mytheli Sreenivas demonstrates how colonial administrators, postcolonial development experts, nationalists, eugenicists, feminists, and family planners all aimed to reform reproduction to transform both individual bodies and the body politic. Across the political spectrum, people insisted that regulating reproduction was necessary and that limiting the population was essential to economic development. This book investigates the often devastating implications of this logic, which demonized some women’s reproduction as the cause of national and planetary catastrophe. To tell this story, Sreenivas explores debates about marriage, family, and contraception. She also demonstrates how concerns about reproduction surfaced within a range of political questions—about poverty and crises of subsistence, migration and claims of national sovereignty, normative heterosexuality and drives for economic development. Locating India at the center of transnational historical change, this book suggests that Indian developments produced the very grounds over which reproduction was called into question in the modern world. The open-access edition of Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India is freely available thanks to the TOME initiative and the generous support of The Ohio State University Libraries.

The imperial Commonwealth

The imperial Commonwealth PDF Author: Wm. Matthew Kennedy
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526162741
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 190

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the late 1800s to the early 1900s, Australian settler colonists mobilised their unique settler experiences to develop their own vision of what ‘empire’ was and could be. Reinterpreting their histories and attempting to divine their futures with a much heavier concentration on racialized visions of humanity, white Australian settlers came to believe that their whiteness as well as their Britishness qualified them for an equal voice in the running of Britain’s imperial project. Through asserting their case, many soon claimed that, as newly minted citizens of a progressive and exemplary Australian Commonwealth, white settlers such as themselves were actually better suited to the modern task of empire. Such a settler political cosmology with empire at its center ultimately led Australians to claim an empire of their own in the Pacific Islands, complete with its own, unique imperial governmentality.

The Great Divergence Reconsidered

The Great Divergence Reconsidered PDF Author: Roman Studer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316239764
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 245

Get Book Here

Book Description
In stark contrast to popular narratives, The Great Divergence Reconsidered shows that Europe's rise to an undisputed world economic leader was not the effect of the Industrial Revolution, and cannot be explained by coal or colonial exploitation. Using a wealth of new historical evidence stretching from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, Roman Studer shows that this 'Great Divergence' must be shifted back to the seventeenth century, if not earlier. Europe was characterized by a more powerful transportation system, bigger trade flows, larger and better integrated markets, higher productivity levels, and superior living standards even before the Industrial Revolution brought about far-reaching structural changes and made Europe's supremacy even more pronounced. While the comparison with Europe draws significantly on India, the central conclusions seem to hold for Asia - and indeed the rest of the world - more generally. An interplay of various factors best explains Europe's early and gradual rise, including better institutions, favorable geographical features, increasing political stability, and increasingly rapid advances in science and technology.

Food Culture Studies in India

Food Culture Studies in India PDF Author: Simi Malhotra
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811552541
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 173

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book discusses food in the context of the cultural matrix of India. Addressing topical issues in food and food culture, it explores questions concerning the consumption, representation and mediation of food. The book is divided into four sections, focusing on food fads; food representation; the symbolic valence of food; modes and manners of resistance articulated through food. Investigating consumption practices in both public and ethnic culture, each chapter introduces a fresh approach to food across diverse literary and cultural genres. The book offers a highly readable guide for researchers and practitioners in the field of literary and cultural studies, as well as the sociological fields of food studies, body studies and fat studies.

A History of India

A History of India PDF Author: Burton Stein
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 9781444323511
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 472

Get Book Here

Book Description
This new edition of Burton Stein's classic A History ofIndia builds on the success of the original to provide anupdated narrative of the development of Indian society, culture,and politics from 7000 BC to the present. New edition of Burton Stein’s classic text provides anarrative from 7000 BC up to the twenty-first century Includes updated and extended coverage of the modern period,with a new chapter covering the death of Nehru in 1964 to thepresent Expands coverage of India's internal political and economicdevelopment, and its wider diplomatic role in the region Features a new introduction, updated glossary and furtherreading sections, and numerous figures, photographs and fullyrevised maps