Unearthing the Past to Forge the Future

Unearthing the Past to Forge the Future PDF Author: Tobias Wolffhardt
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1785336908
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the British East India Company consolidated its rule over India, evolving from a trading venture to a colonial administrative force. Yet its territorial gains far outpaced its understanding of the region and the people who lived there, and its desperate efforts to gain knowledge of the area led to the 1815 appointment of army officer Colin Mackenzie as the first Surveyor General of India. This volume carefully reconstructs the life and career of Mackenzie, showing how the massive survey of India that he undertook became one of the most spectacular and wide-ranging knowledge production initiatives in British colonial history.

Unearthing the Past to Forge the Future

Unearthing the Past to Forge the Future PDF Author: Tobias Wolffhardt
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1785336908
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Get Book

Book Description
For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the British East India Company consolidated its rule over India, evolving from a trading venture to a colonial administrative force. Yet its territorial gains far outpaced its understanding of the region and the people who lived there, and its desperate efforts to gain knowledge of the area led to the 1815 appointment of army officer Colin Mackenzie as the first Surveyor General of India. This volume carefully reconstructs the life and career of Mackenzie, showing how the massive survey of India that he undertook became one of the most spectacular and wide-ranging knowledge production initiatives in British colonial history.

Architecture of Sovereignty

Architecture of Sovereignty PDF Author: Gita V. Pai
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009150154
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
Demonstrates how religious spaces are sites of contestation over sovereignty and broader debates about governance as they have been reconceived repeatedly.

Agrarian Development in Colonial India

Agrarian Development in Colonial India PDF Author: Peter Robb
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000408116
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
This book looks at agriculture, development, poverty and British rule in India, especially in the Patna Division in Bihar between c.1870–1920. It traces the economic influence of British policies and maps the impact of legal, administrative and scientific interventions to rural conditions and norms in the state. The book discusses British theories and policies of ‘improvement’, comparing them with Bihar’s agricultural practice and socio-economic conditions to draw conclusions about rural impoverishment. Following on from his earlier book, Ancient Rights and Future Comfort on the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885, the author also presents case studies on famines, debts, canal and village irrigation, flood-protection and the cultivation and production of indigo, opium and sugar. He analyses extensive archival material to reflect on property law, scientific interventions, cropping patterns, trade and intermediaries. He examines the economic role of governments, Eurocentric development theories and the complex impact of development policy on agriculture and society in Bihar. The book will be of interest to academics and students of colonial history, modern Indian history, agrarian studies, economic history, sociology, and development studies. It will also be useful to development practitioners and researchers working on the history of agrarian conditions and public policy.

The Science of State Power in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1790-1880

The Science of State Power in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1790-1880 PDF Author: Borbala Zsuzsanna Török
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1805395556
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
The formation of modern European states during the long 19th century was a complicated process, challenged by the integration of widely different territories and populations. The Science of State Power in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1790-1880 builds on recent research to investigate the history of statistics as an overlooked part of the sciences of the state in Habsburg legal education as well as within the broader public sphere. By exploring the practices and social spaces of statistics, author Borbála Zsuzsanna Török uncovers its central role in imagining the composite Habsburg Monarchy as a modern and unified administrative space.

Devotional Sovereignty

Devotional Sovereignty PDF Author: Caleb Simmons
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190088893
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Devotional Sovereignty: Kingship and Religion in India investigates the shifting conceptualization of sovereignty in the South Indian kingdom of Mysore during the reigns of Tipu Sultan (r. 1782-1799) and Krishnaraja Wodeyar III (r. 1799-1868). Tipu Sultan was a Muslim king famous for resisting British dominance until his death; Krishnaraja III was a Hindu king who succumbed to British political and administrative control. Despite their differences, the courts of both kings dealt with the changing political landscape by turning to the religious and mythical past to construct a royal identity for their kings. Caleb Simmons explores the ways in which these two kings and their courts modified and adapted pre-modern Indian notions of sovereignty and kingship in reaction to British intervention. The religious past provided an idiom through which the Mysore courts could articulate their rulers' claims to kingship in the region, attributing their rule to divine election and employing religious vocabulary in a variety of courtly genres and media. Through critical inquiry into the transitional early colonial period, this study sheds new light on pre-modern and modern India, with implications for our understanding of contemporary politics. It offers a revisionist history of the accepted narrative in which Tipu Sultan is viewed as a radical Muslim reformer and Krishnaraja III as a powerless British puppet. Simmons paints a picture of both rulers in which they work within and from the same understanding of kingship, utilizing devotion to Hindu gods, goddesses, and gurus to perform the duties of the king.

The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge

The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge PDF Author: Joshua Ehrlich
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009367994
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
The East India Company is remembered as the world's most powerful, not to say notorious, corporation. But for many of its advocates from the 1770s to the 1850s it was also the world's most enlightened one. Joshua Ehrlich reveals that a commitment to knowledge was integral to the Company's ideology. He shows how the Company cited this commitment in defense of its increasingly fraught union of commercial and political power. He moves beyond studies of orientalism, colonial knowledge, and information with a new approach: the history of ideas of knowledge. He recovers a world of debate among the Company's officials and interlocutors, Indian and European, on the political uses of knowledge. Not only were these historical actors highly articulate on the subject but their ideas continue to resonate in the present. Knowledge was a fixture in the politics of the Company – just as it seems to be becoming a fixture in today's politics.

The Guardians of Concepts

The Guardians of Concepts PDF Author: Martina Steber
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1800738277
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 556

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Book Description
Since 1945, what ‘conservative’ means has troubled intellectuals, politicians and parties in the United Kingdom and West Germany. In Britain conservatism was an accepted term of the political vocabulary, denoting a particular tradition of political thought and practice. In West Germany, by contrast, conservatism was a difficult concept for the young democracy to swallow. It carried a heavy antiliberal and antidemocratic burden and led people to question whether there was a place for conservatism within democratic culture after all. The Guardians of Concepts scrutinizes the debates about conservatism in the UK and the Federal Republic of Germany from the late 1940s to the early 1980s. Informed by historical semantics, it conceives of conservatism as a flexible linguistic structure, and shows the importance of language for the self-understanding of many conservatives, who not by chance, have regarded themselves as the guardians of concepts. The intense national and transnational debates about the meaning of conservatism had far-reaching consequences and continue to influence politics today.

Subjects, Citizens, and Others

Subjects, Citizens, and Others PDF Author: Benno Gammerl
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1785337106
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Bosnian Muslims, East African Masai, Czech-speaking Austrians, North American indigenous peoples, and Jewish immigrants from across Europe—the nineteenth-century British and Habsburg Empires were characterized by incredible cultural and racial-ethnic diversity. Notwithstanding their many differences, both empires faced similar administrative questions as a result: Who was excluded or admitted? What advantages were granted to which groups? And how could diversity be reconciled with demands for national autonomy and democratic participation? In this pioneering study, Benno Gammerl compares Habsburg and British approaches to governing their diverse populations, analyzing imperial formations to reveal the legal and political conditions that fostered heterogeneity.

The Power of Scripture

The Power of Scripture PDF Author: Andreas Pečar
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1800733216
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
In England, from the Reformation era to the outbreak of the Civil War, religious authority contributed to popular political discourse in ways that significantly shaped the legitimacy of the monarchy as a form of rule as well as the monarch’s ability to act politically. The Power of Scripture casts aside parochial conceptualizations of that authority’s origins and explores the far-reaching consequences of political biblicism. It shows how arguments, narratives, and norms taken from Biblical scripture not only directly contributed to national religious politics but also left lasting effects on the socio-political development of Stuart England.

Visions of Greater India

Visions of Greater India PDF Author: Yorim Spoelder
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009403168
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
Shows how the transimperial knowledge networks of 'Greater India' energized the interwar nationalist, internationalist and anti-colonial imagination in British India.