scholarly journals The English Cemetery at Surat: Pre-Colonial Cultural Encounters in Western India

2005 ◽  
Vol 85 ◽  
pp. 251-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Scarre ◽  
Judith Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Local Population ◽  
East India Company ◽  
The Political ◽  
Western India ◽  
Cultural Encounters ◽  
Mughal Empire ◽  
Architectural Styles ◽  
Architectural Features ◽  
Changing Attitudes ◽  
Insight Into

During the seventeenth century East India Company merchants settled in several cities of western India under the control of the Mughal Empire. The most important of these was Surat in Gujarat, where an English cemetery of impressive brick and stucco tombs was established. The style and nature of these monuments provide an insight into the cultural interactions that took place between the English merchants and the local population, as well as indicating the political aspirations of the East India Company officials. A description of these tombs, the earliest dating to 1649, is followed by a discussion of the origins of the cemetery, the chronology of the tombs and the identity and status of the dead. It is shown how the adoption of Indo-Islamic architectural styles for the earliest tombs was modified during the eighteenth century by the increasing use of Western architectural features, in line with growing British political power in India during this period. Changing architectural styles are paralleled by the changing attitudes of British visitors to the tombs from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries.

The Political Economy of Opium Smuggling in Early Nineteenth Century India: Leakage or Resistance?

2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
CLAUDE MARKOVITS
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Central India ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
The Political ◽  
Western India ◽  
Trading System

AbstractThis article looks at the political economy of opium smuggling in India in the first decades of the nineteenth century, in particular in relation to Sindh, one of the last independent polities in the subcontinent. After a description of the smuggling of ‘Malwa’ opium (grown in the princely states of Central India) into China—in defiance of the monopoly of the East India Company over ‘Bengal’ or ‘Patna’ opium, grown in Bihar—it considers the role of Indian merchants and capitalists in its emergence and development, and critiques the argument put forward in a recent book by Amar Farooqi that it represented both a form of ‘subversion’ and that it contributed decisively to capital accumulation in Western India. This article concludes by analysing the role of the opium trade in integrating Sindh into the British imperial trading system, arguing that it was more effective in boosting Empire than in nurturing indigenous capitalism in India.

scholarly journals The Political Theory of the Indian Mutiny

1922 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 71-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. W. Buckler
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
East India Company ◽  
The Political ◽  
Mughal Empire ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Indian Mutiny

The “Mutiny” was the summary of the rise of the British in India, and, as the cry of the Sepoys at Meerut was “Delhi, Delhi,” it is in Delhi that the key to a political theory must be sought. The scope of this paper is limited, therefore, to the light thrown upon the subject by “the proceedings of the trial of the King of Delhi.” Its object is to examine afresh this document as a test for a theory of the relations between the East India Company and the Mughal Empire, and consequently of the nature of the rise of the British in India.

A famine in Surat in 1631 and Dodos on Mauritius: a long lost manuscript rediscovered

2017 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 134-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Winters ◽  
J. P. Hume ◽  
M. Leenstra
Keyword(s):  
English Translation ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Secondary Source ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
The Status ◽  
Insight Into

In 1887 Dutch archivist A. J. Servaas van Rooijen published a transcript of a hand-written copy of an anonymous missive or letter, dated 1631, about a horrific famine and epidemic in Surat, India, and also an important description of the fauna of Mauritius. The missive may have been written by a lawyer acting on behalf of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). It not only gives details about the famine, but also provides a unique insight into the status of endemic and introduced Mauritius species, at a time when the island was mostly uninhabited and used only as a replenishment station by visiting ships. Reports from this period are very rare. Unfortunately, Servaas van Rooijen failed to mention the location of the missive, so its whereabouts remained unknown; as a result, it has only been available as a secondary source. Our recent rediscovery of the original hand-written copy provides details about the events that took place in Surat and Mauritius in 1631–1632. A full English translation of the missive is appended.

John Company Armed: The English East India Company, the Anglo-Mughal War and Absolutist Imperialism, c. 1675–1690

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
James M. Vaughn
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
South Asian ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Mughal Empire ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
The Glorious Revolution

During the 1670s and 1680s, the English East India Company pursued an aggressive programme of imperial expansion in the Asian maritime world, culminating in a series of armed assaults on the Mughal Empire. With important exceptions, most scholarship has viewed the Company's coercive imperialism in the later seventeenth century and the First Anglo-Mughal War as the results primarily, if not exclusively, of political and economic conditions in South Asia. This article re-examines and re-interprets this burst of imperial expansion in light of political developments in England and the wider English empire during the later Stuart era. The article contends that the Company's aggressive overseas expansion was pursued for metropolitan and pan-imperial purposes as much as for South Asian ones. The corporation sought to centralise and militarise the English presence in Asia in order both to maintain its control of England's trade to the East and in support of Stuart absolutism. By the eve of the Glorious Revolution, the Company's aggressive imperialism formed part of a wider political project to create an absolute monarchy in England and to establish an autocratic English empire overseas.

On Metaphysics and the Political: A Polemics of Reading Baudelaire in the 1930s

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-259
Author(s):  
Joseph Acquisto
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
Progressive Politics ◽  
The World ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

This essay examines a polemic between two Baudelaire critics of the 1930s, Jean Cassou and Benjamin Fondane, which centered on the relationship of poetry to progressive politics and metaphysics. I argue that a return to Baudelaire's poetry can yield insight into what seems like an impasse in Cassou and Fondane. Baudelaire provides the possibility of realigning metaphysics and politics so that poetry has the potential to become the space in which we can begin to think the two of them together, as opposed to seeing them in unresolvable tension. Or rather, the tension that Baudelaire animates between the two allows us a new way of thinking about the role of esthetics in moments of political crisis. We can in some ways see Baudelaire as responding, avant la lettre, to two of his early twentieth-century readers who correctly perceived his work as the space that breathes a new urgency into the questions of how modern poetry relates to the world from which it springs and in which it intervenes.

Pax and the Politics of Peace

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Cornwell
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Political System ◽  
The Political ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Roman Imperialism ◽  
Two Generations ◽  
Pax Romana ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Insight Into

This book examines the two generations that spanned the collapse of the Republic and the Augustan period to understand how the concept of pax Romana, as a central ideology of Roman imperialism, evolved. The author argues for the integral nature of pax in understanding the changing dynamics of the Roman state through civil war to the creation of a new political system and world-rule. The period of the late Republic to the early Principate involved changes in the notion of imperialism. This is the story of how peace acquired a central role within imperial discourse over the course of the collapse of the Republican framework to become deployed in the legitimization of the Augustan regime. It is an examination of the movement from the debates over the content of the concept, in the dying Republic, to the creation of an authorized version controlled by the princeps, through an examination of a series of conceptions about peace, culminating with the pax augusta as the first crystallization of an imperial concept of peace. Just as there existed not one but a series of ideas concerning Roman imperialism, so too were there numerous different meanings, applications, and contexts within which Romans talked about ‘peace’. Examining these different nuances allows us insight into the ways they understood power dynamics, and how these were contingent on the political structures of the day. Roman discourses on peace were part of the wider discussion on the way in which Rome conceptualized her Empire and ideas of imperialism.

Disengaged and Uninformed: 2000 Presidential Election Coverage in Consumer Magazines Popular with Young Adults

2003 ◽  
Vol 80 (3) ◽  
pp. 513-527 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Reichert ◽  
James E. Mueller ◽  
Michael Nitz
Keyword(s):  
Young Adults ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
Political System ◽  
Political Information ◽  
The Political ◽  
General Interest ◽  
Low Level ◽  
Men's Magazines ◽  
Election Coverage ◽  
Insight Into

This study examines content and tone of political information in five leading general interest and lifestyle magazines from December 1999 through November 2000. The analysis revealed a low level of political information in the selected magazines. With the exception of Rolling Stone and Glamour, the nature of coverage was strategy oriented and superficial, while the tone was mostly cynical in men's magazines, yet favorable toward Gore. The results provide a glimpse of the political information available for typical young adults and insight into the apathetic attitudes of young adults toward the American political system.

The Younghusband-Waddell Collection and Its People: the Social Life of Tibetan Books Gathered in a Late-colonial Enterprise

Inner Asia ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-171
Author(s):  
Hildegard Diemberger
Keyword(s):  
Digital Technology ◽  
Social Life ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Academic Institutions ◽  
Cultural Biography ◽  
The Social ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractIn this paper I follow the social life of the Tibetan books belonging to the Younghusband-Waddell collection. I show how books as literary artefacts can transform from ritual objects into loot, into commodities and into academic treasures and how books can have agency over people, creating networks and shaping identities. Exploring connections between books and people, I look at colonial collecting, Orientalist scholarship and imperial visions from an unusual perspective in which the social life and cultural biography of people and things intertwine and mutually define each other. By following the trajectory of these literary artefacts, I show how their traces left in letters, minutes and acquisition documents give insight into the functioning of academic institutions and their relationship to imperial governing structures and individual aspirations. In particular, I outline the lives of a group of scholars who were involved with this collection in different capacities and whose deeds are unevenly known. This adds a new perspective to the study of this period, which has so far been largely focused on the deeds of key individuals and the political and military setting in which they operated. Finally, I show how the books of this collection have continued to exercise their attraction and moral pressure on twenty-first-century scholars, both Tibetan and international, linking them through digital technology and cyberspace.

John Stuart Mill and Royal India

Utilitas ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin J. Moore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Scientist ◽  
Civil Servant ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
East India Company ◽  
The Political ◽  
Indian States ◽  
Policy Statements ◽  
Daily Occupation

Though John Stuart Mill's long employment by the East India Company (1823–58) did not limit him to drafting despatches on relations with the princely states, that activity must form the centrepiece of any satisfactory study of his Indian career. As yet the activity has scarcely been glimpsed. It produced, on average, about a draft a week, which he listed in his own hand. He subsequently struck out items that he sought to disown in consequence of substantial revisions made by the Company's directors or the Board of Control. He also listed items that achieved publication (mostly only in part) as parliamentary papers and they amount to about ten per cent of his drafts. The two lists, published in the most recent volume of his Collected Works, reveal, at the least, the ‘political’ despatches from which he did not seek to dissociate himself. The despatches were not entirely his work and authorship in the conventional sense may not be assumed. They were the product of an elaborate process, in which many hands were engaged. At worst, they were his work in much the same way that an Act of Parliament is the work of the Crown Solicitor who drafts the bill. At best they were his as are the drafts of a civil servant who believes in policy statements that he prepares for his political masters. The greatest English philosopher and social scientist of the nineteenth century was, in his daily occupation, an employee. His Company was charged with initiating policies for the Indian states and they were subject to the control of a minister of the Crown.

scholarly journals Indigenous Banking Firms in Mughal India: A Reply

1981 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 309-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Leonard
Keyword(s):  
Financial Services ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
The Political ◽  
Working Capital ◽  
Mughal Empire ◽  
Present Issue ◽  
Military Campaigns

In the April 1979 issue of CSSH I proposed a theory: The financial services of leading indigenous banking firms were indispensable to the Mughal state, and the diversion by these firms of resources, both credit and trade, from the Mughals to other political powers in the Indian subcontinent contributed to the downfall of the Mughal empire (p. 152). John F. Richards's article in the present issue takes exception to that theory, challenging the evidentiary basis for my assertions. While stating that further research was admittedly necessary to test and fully substantiate the theory, I certainly offered evidence that these banking firms supplied working capital to the empire and its officials for military campaigns, trade, construction, karkhanah (workshop) production, and personal loans. I also discussed the bankers' regulation of the valuation, exchange, and circulation of currency, and particularly the hundi system of bills of exchange. The political potential of these financial services – of their performance or nonperformance, and on what terms – is obvious. Indeed, I cited instances of political interactions between bankers and officials.

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