Bureaucratic Culture in Early Colonial India

Bureaucratic Culture in Early Colonial India PDF Author: James Lees
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000024644
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
This book looks at how the fledgling British East India Company state of the 1760s developed into the mature Anglo-Indian empire of the 19th century. It investigates the bureaucratic culture of early Company administrators, primarily at the district level, and the influence of that culture on the nature and scope of colonial government in India. Drawing on a host of archival material and secondary sources, James Lees details the power relationship between local officials and their superiors at Fort William in Calcutta, and examines the wider implications of that relationship for Indian society. The book brings to the fore the manner in which the Company’s roots in India were established despite its limited military resources and lack of governmental experience. It underlines how the early colonial polity was shaped by European administrators’ attitudes towards personal and corporate reputation, financial gain, and military governance. A thoughtful intervention in understanding the impact of the Company’s government on Indian society, this volume will be of interest to researchers working within South Asian studies, British studies, administrative history, military history, and the history of colonialism.

Bureaucratic Culture in Early Colonial India

Bureaucratic Culture in Early Colonial India PDF Author: James Lees
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000024644
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 261

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book looks at how the fledgling British East India Company state of the 1760s developed into the mature Anglo-Indian empire of the 19th century. It investigates the bureaucratic culture of early Company administrators, primarily at the district level, and the influence of that culture on the nature and scope of colonial government in India. Drawing on a host of archival material and secondary sources, James Lees details the power relationship between local officials and their superiors at Fort William in Calcutta, and examines the wider implications of that relationship for Indian society. The book brings to the fore the manner in which the Company’s roots in India were established despite its limited military resources and lack of governmental experience. It underlines how the early colonial polity was shaped by European administrators’ attitudes towards personal and corporate reputation, financial gain, and military governance. A thoughtful intervention in understanding the impact of the Company’s government on Indian society, this volume will be of interest to researchers working within South Asian studies, British studies, administrative history, military history, and the history of colonialism.

Bureaucratic Archaeology

Bureaucratic Archaeology PDF Author: Ashish Avikunthak
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009082000
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Bureaucratic Archaeology is a multi-faceted ethnography of quotidian practices of archaeology, bureaucracy and science in postcolonial India, concentrating on the workings of Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). This book uncovers an endemic link between micro-practice of archaeology in the trenches of the ASI to the manufacture of archaeological knowledge, wielded in the making of political and religious identity and summoned as indelible evidence in the juridical adjudication in the highest courts of India. This book is a rare ethnography of the daily practice of a postcolonial bureaucracy from within rather than from the outside. It meticulously uncovers the social, cultural, political and epistemological ecology of ASI archaeologists to show how postcolonial state assembles and produces knowledge. This is the first book length monograph on the workings of archaeology in a non-western world, which meticulously shows how theory of archaeological practice deviates, transforms and generates knowledge outside the Euro-American epistemological tradition.

The Formation of the Colonial State in India

The Formation of the Colonial State in India PDF Author: Hayden J. Bellenoit
Publisher: Routledge Studies in South Asian History
ISBN: 9781138347571
Category : India
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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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.

Bureaucracy, Belonging, and the City in North India

Bureaucracy, Belonging, and the City in North India PDF Author: MICHAEL S. DODSON
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781032400136
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book is a re-evaluation of modern urbanism and architecture and a history of urbanism, architecture, and local identity in colonial north India at the turn of the twentieth century. Focusing on Banaras and Jaunpur, two of northern India's most traditional cities, the book examines the workings of colonial bureaucracy in the cities and argues that interactions with the colonial state were an integral aspect of the ways that Indians created a sense of their own personal investment in the city in which they lived. The book explores the every-day and the mundane to better understand the limits of British colonial power, and the role of Indians themselves, in the making of the modern city. Based on highly localized archival source material, the author analyses two key aspects of city-making in this era: the building of new infrastructure, such as water supply and sewerage, and new policies governing historical architectural conservation. The book also incorporates an ethnography of contemporary urban space in these cities to advocate for a more nuanced and responsible approach to writing the history of such cities and to address the myriad problems of present-day north Indian urbanism. Containing examples of bureaucratic procedure and its contradictions and enlivened by a set of personal reflections and narratives of the author's own experiences, this book is a valuable addition to the field of South Asian Studies, Asian History and Asian Culture and Society, Colonial History and Urban History.

Empires and Bureaucracy in World History

Empires and Bureaucracy in World History PDF Author: Peter Crooks
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 131672106X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
How did empires rule different peoples across vast expanses of space and time? And how did small numbers of imperial bureaucrats govern large numbers of subordinated peoples? Empires and Bureaucracy in World History seeks answers to these fundamental problems in imperial studies by exploring the power and limits of bureaucracy. The book is pioneering in bringing together historians of antiquity and the Middle Ages with scholars of post-medieval European empires, while a genuinely world-historical perspective is provided by chapters on China, the Incas and the Ottomans. The editors identify a paradox in how bureaucracy operated on the scale of empires and so help explain why some empires endured for centuries while, in the contemporary world, empires fail almost before they begin. By adopting a cross-chronological and world-historical approach, the book challenges the abiding association of bureaucratic rationality with 'modernity' and the so-called 'Rise of the West'.

Bureaucratic Archaeology

Bureaucratic Archaeology PDF Author: Ashish Avikunthak
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316512398
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 363

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Book Description
An ethnography of archaeological practice in postcolonial India that reveals the bureaucratic culture in the making of knowledge about past.

The Rule of Law and Emergency in Colonial India

The Rule of Law and Emergency in Colonial India PDF Author: Haruki Inagaki
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030736636
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
This book takes a closer look at colonial despotism in early nineteenth-century India and argues that it resulted from Indians’ forum shopping, the legal practice which resulted in jurisdictional jockeying between an executive, the East India Company, and a judiciary, the King’s Court. Focusing on the collisions that took place in Bombay during the 1820s, the book analyses how Indians of various descriptions—peasants, revenue defaulters, government employees, merchants, chiefs, and princes—used the court to challenge the government (and vice versa) and demonstrates the mechanism through which the lawcourt hindered the government’s indirect rule, which relied on local Indian rulers in newly conquered territories. The author concludes that existing political anxiety justified the East India Company’s attempt to curtail the power of the court and strengthen their own power to intervene in emergencies through the renewal of the company’s charter in 1834. An insightful read for those researching Indian history and judicial politics, this book engages with an understudied period of British rule in India, where the royal courts emerged as sites of conflict between the East India Company and a variety of Indian powers.

Colonial Terror

Colonial Terror PDF Author: Deana Heath
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192646168
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Focusing on India between the early nineteenth century and the First World War, Colonial Terror explores the centrality of the torture of Indian bodies to the law-preserving violence of colonial rule and some of the ways in which extraordinary violence was embedded in the ordinary operation of colonial states. Although enacted largely by Indians on Indian bodies, particularly by subaltern members of the police, the book argues that torture was facilitated, systematized, and ultimately sanctioned by first the East India Company and then the Raj because it benefitted the colonial regime, since rendering the police a source of terror played a key role in the construction and maitenance of state sovereignty. Drawing upon the work of both Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, Colonial Terror contends, furthermore, that it is only possible to understand the terrorizing nature of the colonial police in India by viewing colonial India as a 'regime of exception' in which two different forms of exceptionality were in operation - one wrought through the exclusion of particular groups or segments of the Indian population from the law and the other by petty sovereigns in their enactment of illegal violence in the operation of the law. It was in such fertile ground, in which colonial subjects were both included within the domain of colonial law while also being abandoned by it, that torture was able to flourish.

Bureaucracy, Community and Influence in India

Bureaucracy, Community and Influence in India PDF Author: William Gould
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136926798
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 492

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Book Description
Offering a fresh approach to the issue of government and administrative corruption through 'everyday' citizen interactions with the state, this book explores changing discourses and practices of corruption in late colonial and early independent Uttar Pradesh, India. The author moves away from assumptions that the state can primarily be associated with the top levels of government, and looks at citizens' approaches to local level bureaucracies and police. The central argument of the book is that deeply 'institutionalised' corruption in India could only have come about through the exercise of particular long term customs of interaction between agencies of the state - government servants and police, and their interactions with local politicians. Because the social hierarchies that condition such interactions are complicated by individual and family connections to state employment, periods of traumatic state transformation lead to a reconfiguration in the meaning of corruption in the local state. Based on principal primary sources and extensive field interviews, this book will be of interest to academics working on political science and Indian and South Asian history.

Empires and Bureaucracy in World History

Empires and Bureaucracy in World History PDF Author: Peter Crooks
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107166039
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
A comparative study of the power and limits of bureaucracy in historical empires from ancient Rome to the twentieth century.