1st Edition
Routledge Handbook of the History of Colonialism in South Asia
The Routledge Handbook of the History of Colonialism in South Asia provides a comprehensive overview of the historiographical specialisation and sophistication of the history of colonialism in South Asia. It explores the classic works of earlier generations of historians and offers an introduction to the rapid and multifaceted development of historical research on colonial South Asia since the 1990s. Covering economic history, political history, and social history and offering insights from other disciplines and ‘turns’ within the mainstream of history, the handbook is structured in six parts:
- Overarching Themes and Debates
- The World of Economy and Labour
- Creating and Keeping Order: Science, Race, Religion, Law, and Education
- Environment and Space
- Culture, Media, and the Everyday
- Colonial South Asia in the World
The editors have assembled a group of leading international scholars of South Asian history and related disciplines to introduce a broad readership into the respective subfields and research topics. Designed to serve as a comprehensive and nuanced yet readable introduction to the vast field of the history of colonialism in the Indian subcontinent, the handbook will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of South Asian history, imperial and colonial history, and global and world history.
Part I Overarching Themes and Debates
1. Caste in British India: between continuity and colonial construc-tion
Dwaipayan Sen
2. The Political Economy of Colonialism in India
David Washbrook
3. State formation in India: from the Company state to the late colonial state
Michael Mann
4. Nationalisms and their discontents in Colonial India
William Gould
5. Reordering religion in colonial South Asia
Brian Hatcher
6. Reconstituting Masculinities/Femininities: Modern Experiences
Tanika Sarkar
7. Contested history: the rise of communalism and the Partition of British India
Ian Talbot
8. The Raj’s uncanny other: Indirect rule and the princely states
Teresa Segura-Garcia
Part II The World of Economy and Labour
9. The Emergence of A ‘Modern’ Urban-Industrial Workforce in India, 1860–1914
Aditya Sarkar
10. Military labour markets in colonial India from the Company state to World War II
Gavin Rand
11. Merchants, Moneylenders, Karkhanedars, and the Emergence of the Informal Sector
Sebastian Schwecke
12. Indian big business under the Company and the Raj
Claude Markovits
13. Revenue extraction in colonial South Asia
Hayden Bellenoit
Part III Creating and keeping Order: Science, Race, Religion, Law and Education
14. The Science and Medicine of Colonial India
David Arnold
15. Race in colonial South Asia: Science and the law
Projit Mukharji
16. ‘A Race Apart’? – The European Community in Colonial India
Satoshi Mizutani
17. Christian missionary agendas in colonial India
Heike Liebau
18. Penal law, penology and prisons in colonial India
Michael Offermann
19. Terrorism and counter-terrorism in colonial India
Joseph McQuade
20. Schooling the Subcontinent: State, Space and Society, and the Dynamics of Education in Colonial South Asia
Michael Brunner
Part IV Environment and Space
21. Of Lives and Landscapes: The Environmental History of Colonial South Asia
Arnab Dey
22. Questioning ‘railway-centrism’: Infrastructural governance and cultures of colonial transport system, 1760s–1900s
Nitin Sinha
23. Colonial Port Cities and the Infrastructure of Empire: Tracing the Geography of Alcohol in British Colonial India
Swati Chattopadhyay
24. Site of deficiency and site of hope: the village in colonial South Asia
Sanjukta Das Gupta
25. Imperial Sanctuaries: The Hill Stations of Colonial South Asia
Nandini Bhattacharya
26. Agrarian history of colonial South Asia
Nikolay Kamenov
Part V Culture, Media and the Everyday
27. Physical Culture and the Body in Colonial India, c. 1800–1947
Carey Watt
28. Before Bollywood: Bombay Cinema and the Rise of the Film Industry in Late Colonial India
Harald Fischer-Tiné
29. Rhythms of the Raj: Music in Colonial South Asia
Bob van der Linden
31. Consumer Practices and ‘Consumerism’ in Late Colonial India
Douglas Haynes
31. Food and Intoxicants in British India
Utsa Ray
32. Languages, Literatures and the Public Sphere
Hans Harder
33. Emotions, senses and perception of the self
Margrit Pernau
Part VI Colonial South Asia in the World
34. Women, Migration and Travel from Colonial India
Shompa Lahiri
35. Debates on Citizenship in Colonial South Asia and Global Political Thought, c. 1880–1950
Elena Valdameri
36. South Asia and South Asians in the world-wide web of anticolonial solidarity
Carolien Stolte
37. Disruptive entanglements: South Asia and South Asians in the World Wars
Ravi Ahuja
38.Indian humanitarianism under colonial rule: Imperial loyalty, national self-assertion and anticolonial emancipation
Maria Framke
39. Famine Relief in Colonial South Asia, 1858–1947: Regional and Global Perspectives
Joanna Simonow
Biography
Harald Fischer-Tiné is Professor of Modern Global History at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zürich) Switzerland. He has published extensively on South Asian colonial history and the history of the British Empire. His research interests include global and transnational history, the history of knowledge and the social and cultural history of colonial South Asia. His many publications include Low and Licentious Europeans: Race, Class, and 'White Subalternity' in Colonial India (2009) and Shyamji Krishnavarma: Sanskrit, Sociology and Anti-Imperialism (2014).
Maria Framke is a historian at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin, Germany. She works on the history of imperial, international and nationalist politics, humanitarianism, and ideologies in the twentieth century. She is also the author of Engagement with Italian Fascism and German National Socialism in India, 1922–1939 (2013).
The volume offers a comprehensive, nuanced, yet highly accessible and readable introduction to the key historiographical and methodological debates that have shaped the field of colonial studies on South Asia for the past decades. [...] It will be most useful to newcomers to the field of modern South Asian studies, as it provides effective and eminently readable introductions to some of the key debates, schools of thoughts, and developments in the historiography of this region over the last four decades. At the same time, the volume will also be useful to more seasoned practitioners who are seeking to expand their teaching or research by providing detailed bibliographies of the latest research on these topics. Overall, this volume provides a valuable contribution to our knowledge and understanding of South Asian colonial history and historiography, and this author anticipates it will quickly become a standard text assigned for courses about the history of modern South Asia and the British Empire in India.
Mark Condos, King’s College London, UK. Connections. A Journal for Historians and Area Specialists (June 2022)
