Colonial Self-Fashioning in British India, c. 1785-1845
Colonial Self-Fashioning in British India, c. 1785-1845

Author: Prasannajit de Silva

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2018-07-26

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 1527514285

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A stereotypical view of the nineteenth-century British in India, which might be characterised as one of deliberate isolation and segregation from their surroundings, has recently been complemented by one evoking a high degree of integration and closer co-existence in the eighteenth century. Focusing on a period which straddles this apparent shift, this book explores a variety of ways in which British residents in India represented their lives through visual material, and reveals a more nuanced position. Consideration of these images, which have often been overlooked in the scholarly literature, opens up questions of identity facing the British population in India at this time and facing colonial societies more generally, and issues about the role of visual culture in negotiating them. It also underlines the fragile and contested nature of identity: the colonists’ self-fashioning encompassed not only expressions of difference from their Indian setting, but also what distinguished them from their compatriots back in Britain, as well as engaging with metropolitan attitudes towards, and prejudices about, them.

Trust and Distrust
Trust and Distrust

Author: Mark Knights

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-01-08

Total Pages: 505

ISBN-13: 0198796242

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Mark Knights offers the first overview of Britain's history of corruption in office in the pre-modern era, 1600-1850. Drawing on extensive archival material, Knights shows how corruption in the domestic and imperial spheres interacted, and how the concept of corruption developed during this period, changing British ideas of trust and distrust.

Unseen Enemy
Unseen Enemy

Author: Sudip Bhattacharya

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2014-06-30

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1443863092

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Europeans in early colonial Bengal fell prey to new diseases that their limited pharmacopeia, based on an imperfect knowledge of physiology, often failed to treat. This book looks at clinical observations and theories by several English doctors, who, with the encouragement of the East India Company, strove to address these ailments. This enthralling story begins with John Woodall, who never voyaged to India but equipped the surgeons’ chests aboard ships sailing there, and ends with James Esdaile’s contentious work at the experimental Mesmeric Hospital he was permitted to set up briefly in Calcutta.

Welsh missionaries and British imperialism
Welsh missionaries and British imperialism

Author: Andrew May

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2017-02-01

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1526118750

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In 1841, the Welsh sent their first missionary, Thomas Jones, to evangelise the tribal peoples of the Khasi Hills of north-east India. This book follows Jones from rural Wales to Cherrapunji, the wettest place on earth and now one of the most Christianised parts of India. As colonised colonisers, the Welsh were to have a profound impact on the culture and beliefs of the Khasis. The book also foregrounds broader political, scientific, racial and military ideologies that mobilised the Khasi Hills into an interconnected network of imperial control. Its themes are universal: crises of authority, the loneliness of geographical isolation, sexual scandal, greed and exploitation, personal and institutional dogma, individual and group morality. Written by a direct descendant of Thomas Jones, it makes a significant contribution in orienting the scholarship of imperialism to a much-neglected corner of India, and will appeal to students of the British imperial experience more broadly.

Mapping an Empire
Mapping an Empire

Author: Matthew H. Edney

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2009-02-15

Total Pages: 481

ISBN-13: 0226184862

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In this fascinating history of the British surveys of India, Matthew H. Edney relates how imperial Britain used modern survey techniques to not only create and define the spatial image of its Empire, but also to legitimate its colonialist activities. "There is much to be praised in this book. It is an excellent history of how India came to be painted red in the nineteenth century. But more importantly, Mapping an Empire sets a new standard for books that examine a fundamental problem in the history of European imperialism."—D. Graham Burnett, Times Literary Supplement "Mapping an Empire is undoubtedly a major contribution to the rapidly growing literature on science and empire, and a work which deserves to stimulate a great deal of fresh thinking and informed research."—David Arnold, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History "This case study offers broadly applicable insights into the relationship between ideology, technology and politics. . . . Carefully read, this is a tale of irony about wishful thinking and the limits of knowledge."—Publishers Weekly

Early Writings on India
Early Writings on India

Author: H.K. Kaul

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-04-07

Total Pages: 449

ISBN-13: 1351867172

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This book, first published in 1975, is a comprehensive list of all the books on India, written in English before 1900. It is an invaluable reference source on India of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Apart from the work of professional writers, there are the writings of a cross-section of society from soldiers to scientists. We find dictionaries of obscure dialects written by government officials, descriptions of their travels by visiting clerics, homely details of everyday life by housewives, as well as technical and scientific works written by scholars.