Transformations on the Bengal Frontier

Transformations on the Bengal Frontier PDF Author: Subhajyoti Ray
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136848517
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
An analysis of the socio-economic changes brought about by colonial rule in a frontier area of Bengal, Jalpaiguri. Challenging long established debates focused around the powers of dominant groups over a settled peasantry, this book broadens our perspective on the 18th century, promoting a deeper understanding of the change-over from the pre-colonial to the colonial era.

Transformations on the Bengal Frontier

Transformations on the Bengal Frontier PDF Author: Subhajyoti Ray
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136848517
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book

Book Description
An analysis of the socio-economic changes brought about by colonial rule in a frontier area of Bengal, Jalpaiguri. Challenging long established debates focused around the powers of dominant groups over a settled peasantry, this book broadens our perspective on the 18th century, promoting a deeper understanding of the change-over from the pre-colonial to the colonial era.

The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204-1760

The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204-1760 PDF Author: Richard M. Eaton
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520917774
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
In all of the South Asian subcontinent, Bengal was the region most receptive to the Islamic faith. This area today is home to the world's second-largest Muslim ethnic population. How and why did such a large Muslim population emerge there? And how does such a religious conversion take place? Richard Eaton uses archaeological evidence, monuments, narrative histories, poetry, and Mughal administrative documents to trace the long historical encounter between Islamic and Indic civilizations. Moving from the year 1204, when Persianized Turks from North India annexed the former Hindu states of the lower Ganges delta, to 1760, when the British East India Company rose to political dominance there, Eaton explores these moving frontiers, focusing especially on agrarian growth and religious change.

Climate Change in the Forest of Bengal Duars

Climate Change in the Forest of Bengal Duars PDF Author: Koyel Sam
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030738663
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 71

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Book Description
This book focuses on more than 100 years of climatic oscillation in Bengal Duars, a unique foothill landscape of the Eastern Himalaya, to discuss the dynamics of life and livelihoods of forest dependent communities towards climate change related impacts. The authors describe the struggles the people of this region face, including climate vulnerability, displacement, migration, and human-animal conflict, and provides a unique and comprehensive analysis of the interconnection between perceptions and responses of forest villagers for survival and adaptation to climate change. The book presents advanced quantitative methods and field-based studies applied in the region to help researchers and policy makers comprehend and measure potential and actual adaptation attitudes of the villagers, while also understanding the present challenges, risk patterns, and potential impacts climate change has on the natural environment and community life. The book will additionally be of interest to students and researchers in geography, forestry, ecology and environmental science.

Epidemic Encounters, Communities, and Practices in the Colonial World

Epidemic Encounters, Communities, and Practices in the Colonial World PDF Author: Poonam Bala
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 179365123X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
The essays in this volume examine the nature and extent of disease on indigenous communities and local populations located within the vast regions of the Indian and Pacific Oceans as a result of colonial sea power and colonial conquest. While this established a long-term impact of disease on populations, the essays also offer insights into the dynamics of these populations in resisting colonial intrusions and introduction of disease to newly-acquired territories.

Becoming a Borderland

Becoming a Borderland PDF Author: Sanghamitra Misra
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136197222
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
This book discusses the politics of space and identity in the borderlands of northeastern India between the early 1800s and the 1930s. Critiquing contemporary post-colonial histories where this region emerges as fragments, this book sees these perspectives as continuing to be entrapped in a civilizational approach to history writing. Beginning in the pre-colonial period where it focuses on the negotiated character of state-formation during the Mughal imperium, the book then enters the space of the colonial where it looks at some of the early interventions of the East India Company. The analysis of markets as transmitters of authority highlights an important argument that the book makes. Peasantization and the introduction of the notion of the sedentary agriculturist as the productive subject also come up for a detailed discussion, along with economic change and property settlements, which are seen as important ways through which the institution of colonial legality got entrenched in the region. Underlining the interface between the political economy and practices of cultural studies, the book also explores the connections between speech, production of counter narratives of historical memory, political culture and economy, with a focus on the cultural production of a borderland identity that was marked by hyphenated existence between proto- 'Bengal' and proto- 'Assam'.

Colonial Globalization and its Effects on South Asia

Colonial Globalization and its Effects on South Asia PDF Author: Ashfaque Hossain
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000641813
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
This book investigates the concept of colonial globalization to show how knowledge, information, technology, capital and labour have the potential to move freely across the world. It studies the experience of globalization "from below", rather than from the perspective of the British imperial centre. Focusing on the impact of colonial globalization on the people of Sylhet, East Bengal, and Assam, the volume seeks to analyse the "global" as a process in constant negotiation with the "local". It discusses various issues such as the opening of the hills of Sylhet and Assam for tea plantation. the involvement of local entrepreneurs with overseas planters in the global tea industry, the phenomenon of regional labour migration into eastern India, and Sylheti seamen and their involvement in the merchant marine. The author also highlights the contribution of peasants, labourers and women in the independence movement and the irreversible changes that they brought about. A unique contribution to the study of colonial globalisation, this volume will be indispensable for students and researchers of colonial history, modern Indian history, Northeast India, border studies, globalization, political economy, minority studies, globalization studies, third world studies, colonialism and postcolonialism, and South Asian studies.

Migrations, Identities and Democratic Practices in India

Migrations, Identities and Democratic Practices in India PDF Author: Samir Kumar Das
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351175246
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
This book explores contesting identities, international politics, migration and democratic practices in the context of globalizing India. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, it looks at one of the oldest migratory routes across a volatile region in eastern India which is fraught with violent claims of separate statehood. The book offers an account of how the ‘North Bengal’ region has acted as a gateway to migrant populations over time and points to why it must be understood as a shifting and liminal space through a study of Bodoland, Gorkhaland, Kamatapuri, Siliguri and the Greater Cooch Behar movements. It shows the region’s politics of identity or quest for homeland not as a means of compensating for the lack or absence of identity, but as an everyday practice of living that very absence, across borders and boundaries, without arriving at any definitive and stable identity, along with impacts and manifestations in democratic political processes. A major intervention in modern political theory – shedding new light on concepts such as home and homeland, space and self, sovereignty, nation-state, freedom and democracy – this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of political science, modern South Asian history, sociology and social anthropology, and migration and diaspora studies.

Peasants, Capitalism, and Imperialism in an Age of Politico-Ecological Crisis

Peasants, Capitalism, and Imperialism in an Age of Politico-Ecological Crisis PDF Author: Mark Tilzey
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100096258X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
This book utilises a new theoretical approach to understand the dynamics of the peasantry, and peasant resistance, in relation to capitalism, state, class, and imperialism in the global South. In this companion volume to Peasants, Capitalism, and the Work of Eric R. Wolf, the authors further develop their thinking on agrarian transitions to capitalism, the development of imperialism, and the place of the peasantry in these dynamics, with special reference to the global South in an era of politico-ecological crisis. Focusing on the political role of the peasantry in contested transitions to capitalism and to modes of production outside of, and beyond, capitalism, the book contends that an understanding of these dynamics requires an analysis of class struggle and of the resources, material and discursive, that different classes can bring to bear on this struggle. The book focuses on the rise of capitalism in the global South within the context of imperial subordination to the global North, and the place of the peasantry in shaping and resisting these dynamics. The book presents case studies of contested transitions to agrarian capitalism in Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, and South Asia. It also examines the case of transition to a post-capitalist mode of production in Cuba. The book concludes with an assessment of the nature of capitalism and imperialism within the context of the contemporary politico-ecological crisis, and the potential role of the peasantry as agent of emancipatory change towards social and environmental sustainability. This book will be of great interest to students and researchers in the areas of peasant studies, rural politics, agrarian studies, development, and political ecology.

The Mortal God

The Mortal God PDF Author: Milinda Banerjee
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316996387
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
The Mortal God is a study in intellectual history which uncovers how actors in colonial India imagined various figures of human, divine, and messianic rulers to battle over the nature and locus of sovereignty. It studies British and Indian political-intellectual elites as well as South Asian peasant activists, giving particular attention to Bengal, including the associated princely states of Cooch Behar and Tripura. Global intellectual history approaches are deployed to place India within wider trajectories of royal nationhood that unfolded across contemporaneous Europe and Asia. The book intervenes within theoretical debates about sovereignty and political theology, and offers novel arguments about decolonizing and subalternizing sovereignty.

Madeleine's Children

Madeleine's Children PDF Author: Sue Peabody
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190233893
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Madeleine's Children uncovers a multigenerational saga of an enslaved family in India and two islands, Réunion and Mauritius, in the eastern empires of France and Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A tale of legal intrigue, it reveals the lives and secret relationships between slaves and free people that have remained obscure for two centuries. As a child, Madeleine was pawned by her impoverished family and became the slave of a French woman in Bengal. She accompanied her mistress to France as a teenager, but she did not challenge her enslavement there on the basis of France's Free Soil principle, a consideration that did not come to light until future lawyers investigated her story. In France, a new master and mistress purchased her, despite laws prohibiting the sale of slaves within the kingdom. The couple transported Madeleine across the ocean to their plantation in the Indian Ocean colonies, where she eventually gave birth to three children: Maurice, Constance, and Furcy. One died a slave and two eventually became free, but under very different circumstances. On 21 November 1817, Furcy exited the gates of his master's mansion and declared himself a free man. The lawsuit waged by Furcy to challenge his wrongful enslavement ultimately brought him before the Royal Court of Paris, despite the extreme measures that his putative master, Joseph Lory, deployed to retain him as his slave. A meticulous work of archival detection, Madeleine's Children investigates the cunning, clandestine, and brutal strategies that masters devised to keep slaves under their control-and paints a vivid picture of the unique and evolving meanings of slavery and freedom in the Indian Ocean world.