Knowledge, mediation and empire
Knowledge, mediation and empire

Author: Florence D'Souza

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2015-07-01

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 1784992089

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This study of the British colonial administrator James Tod (1782–1835), who spent five years in north-western India (1818–22) collecting every conceivable type of material of historical or cultural interest on the Rajputs and the Gujaratis, gives special attention to his role as a mediator of knowledge about this little-known region of the British Empire in the early nineteenth century to British and European audiences. The book aims to illustrate that British officers did not spend all their time oppressing and inferiorising the indigenous peoples under their colonial authority, but also contributed to propagating cultural and scientific information about them, and that they did not react only negatively to the various types of human difference they encountered in the field.

Empire of Religion
Empire of Religion

Author: David Chidester

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2014-03-19

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 022611757X

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How is knowledge about religion and religions produced, and how is that knowledge authenticated and circulated? David Chidester seeks to answer these questions in Empire of Religion, documenting and analyzing the emergence of a science of comparative religion in Great Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century and its complex relations to the colonial situation in southern Africa. In the process, Chidester provides a counterhistory of the academic study of religion, an alternative to standard accounts that have failed to link the field of comparative religion with either the power relations or the historical contingencies of the imperial project. In developing a material history of the study of religion, Chidester documents the importance of African religion, the persistence of the divide between savagery and civilization, and the salience of mediations—imperial, colonial, and indigenous—in which knowledge about religions was produced. He then identifies the recurrence of these mediations in a number of case studies, including Friedrich Max Müller’s dependence on colonial experts, H. Rider Haggard and John Buchan’s fictional accounts of African religion, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s studies of African religion. By reclaiming these theorists for this history, Chidester shows that race, rather than theology, was formative in the emerging study of religion in Europe and North America. Sure to be controversial, Empire of Religion is a major contribution to the field of comparative religious studies.

Mirabai
Mirabai

Author: Nancy M. Martin

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-07-24

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 0195153898

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Mirabai, an iconic sixteenth-century Indian poet-saint, is renowned for her unwavering love of God, her disregard for social hierarchies and gendered notions of honor and shame, and her challenge to familial, feudal, and religious authorities. Defying attempts to constrain and even kill her, she could not be silenced. Though verifiable facts regarding her life are few, her fame spread across social, linguistic, and religious boundaries, and stories about her multiplied across the subcontinent and the centuries. In Mirabai, Nancy M. Martin traces the story of this immensely popular Indian saint from the earliest manuscript references to her through colonial and nationalist developments to scholarly and popular portrayals in the decades leading up to Indian independence. This book examines Mirabai's place as both insider and outsider to the developing strands of devotional Hinduism and her role in contested terrain of debates around the education and independence of women and the crafting of Indian and Hindu identities. Mirabai offers a comprehensive and multi-layered portrait of this remarkable and still controversial woman, who continues to be a source of inspiration and catalyst for self-actualization for spiritual seekers, artists, activists, and so many others in India and around the world today.

Empress
Empress

Author: Miles Taylor

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2018-10-02

Total Pages: 486

ISBN-13: 0300243421

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“A widely and deeply researched, elegantly written, and vital portrayal of [Queen Victoria’s] place in colonial Indian affairs.”(Journal of Modern History) In this engaging and controversial book, Miles Taylor shows how both Victoria and Albert were spellbound by India, and argues that the Queen was humanely, intelligently, and passionately involved with the country throughout her reign and not just in the last decades. Taylor also reveals the way in which Victoria’s influence as empress contributed significantly to India’s modernization, both political and economic. This is, in a number of respects, a fresh account of imperial rule in India, suggesting that it was one of Victoria’s successes. “Readers encounter a detail-attentive and independently minded monarch . . . .Information, offered with verve and occasional humor, fills chapters of Empress with little-known details of Victoria’s active rule as Empress.” —Adrienne Munich, Victorian Studies “This is a nuanced portrait of an empire rich in contradiction.” —Catherine Hall, author of Civilising Subjects “Beautifully written and subtly crafted, this book provides a critical history of the cultural, political, and diplomatic significance of Queen Victoria's role as Empress of India.” —Tristram Hunt, Director of Victoria and Albert Museum “This is a highly intelligent, wonderfully lucid and well researched book that rests on an impressive array of Indian as well as European sources. It makes a powerful case for re-assessing Queen Victoria's own role and political and religious ideas in regard to the subcontinent.” —Linda Colley, author of Britons

Class, work and whiteness
Class, work and whiteness

Author: Nicola Ginsburgh

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2020-08-18

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 1526143895

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This book offers the first comprehensive history of white workers from the end of the First World War to Zimbabwean independence in 1980. It reveals how white worker identity was constituted, examines the white labouring class as an ethnically and nationally heterogeneous formation comprised of both men and women, and emphasises the active participation of white workers in the ongoing and contested production of race. White wage labourers' experiences, both as exploited workers and as part of the privileged white minority, offer insight into how race and class co-produced one another and how boundaries fundamental to settler colonialism were regulated and policed. Based on original research conducted in Zimbabwe, South Africa and the UK, this book offers a unique theoretical synthesis of work on gender, whiteness studies, labour histories, settler colonialism, Marxism, emotions and the New African Economic History.

Multiple Paths to Knowledge in International Relations
Multiple Paths to Knowledge in International Relations

Author: Zeev Maoz

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 9780739106723

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Multiple Paths to Knowledge in International Relations provides a uniquely valuable view of current approaches and findings in conflict studies. While expanding our knowledge of particular conflicts, from the Crimean War to the Vietnam War to ongoing Palestinian-Israeli instability, the notable contributors also further our understanding of how to conduct research in international relations.

Empire and mobility in the long nineteenth century
Empire and mobility in the long nineteenth century

Author: David Lambert

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2020-06-08

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 1526126400

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Mobility was central to imperialism, from the human movements entailed in exploration, travel and migration to the information, communications and commodity flows vital to trade, science, governance and military power. While historians have written on exploration, commerce, imperial transport and communications networks, and the movements of slaves, soldiers and scientists, few have reflected upon the social, cultural, economic and political significance of mobile practices, subjects and infrastructures that underpin imperial networks, or examined the qualities of movement valued by imperial powers and agents at different times. This collection explores the intersection of debates on imperial relations, colonialism and empire with emerging work on mobility. In doing this, it traces how the movements of people, representations and commodities helped to constitute the British empire from the late-eighteenth century through to the Second World War.

Identity, Mediation, and the Cunning of Capital
Identity, Mediation, and the Cunning of Capital

Author: Ani Maitra

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2020-05-15

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 0810141817

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In Identity, Mediation, and the Cunning of Capital, Ani Maitra urgently calls for a reevaluation of identity politics as an aesthetic maneuver regulated by capitalism. A dominant critical trend in the humanities, Maitra argues, is to dismiss or embrace identity through the formal properties of a privileged aesthetic medium such as literature, cinema, or even the performative body. In contrast, he demonstrates that identity politics becomes unavoidably real and material only because the minoritized subject is split between multiple sites of mediation—visual, linguistic, and sonic—while remaining firmly tethered to capitalism’s hierarchical logic of value production. Only in the interstices of media can we track the aesthetic conversion of identitarian difference into value, marked by the inequities of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Maitra’s archive is transnational and multimodal. Moving from anticolonial polemics to psychoanalysis to diasporic experimental literature to postcolonial feminist and queer media, he lays bare the cunning by which capitalism produces and fragments identity through an intermedial “aesthetic dissonance” with the commodity form. Maitra’s novel contribution to theories of identity and to the concept of mediation will interest a wide range of scholars in media studies, critical race and postcolonial studies, and critical aesthetics.

Nature and the Godly Empire
Nature and the Godly Empire

Author: Sujit Sivasundaram

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2005-11-17

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 9780521848367

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A study of the relations between nineteenth-century science and Christianity.

Dividing the spoils
Dividing the spoils

Author: Henrietta Lidchi

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2020-09-29

Total Pages: 490

ISBN-13: 1526139227

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At a time of heightened international interest in the colonial dimensions of museum collections, Dividing the Spoils provides new perspectives on the motivations and circumstances whereby collections were appropriated and acquired during colonial military service. Combining approaches from the fields of material anthropology, imperial and military history, this book argues for a deeper examination of these collections within a range of intercultural histories that include alliance, diplomacy, curiosity and enquiry, as well as expropriation and cultural hegemony. As museums across Europe reckon with the post-colonial legacies of their collections, Dividing the Spoils explores how the amassing of objects was understood and governed in British military culture, and considers how objects functioned in museum collections thereafter, suggesting new avenues for sustained investigation in a controversial, contested field.