Trading Firms in Colonial India

2014 ◽  
Vol 88 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tirthankar Roy

The aim of this article is to develop a general narrative of the firms that led the growth of trade in nineteenth-century India, and thus to supply a missing piece in modern Indian business history. The trading firms had several features in common with trading firms globally, especially, a high degree of mobility, institutional adaptation, and occasionally, diversification into banking and manufacturing. But certain aspects of the process were specific to the regions where they operated, such as differences between the ports and the interior trading orders, between cities, and between expatriate and indigenous firms. The article reconsiders these features.

Author(s):  
František Čapka

AbstractThis study focuses on the process of the gradual shaping of Czech national awareness in Moravia from the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards when the necessary conditions for the development of improved mutual relations between the Czech (Slavic) population in the two Lands of the Czech Crown -Bohemia and Moravia - were slowly being formed. Moravia faced a number of handicaps to the development of a national revival in comparison with Bohemia, the most significant of which was the relatively high degree of Germanisation of the land. A change to the image of Moravia came in the revolutionary years 1848/1849, when Czech national awareness spread to broader sections of society in Moravia. The view of Bohemia held by the Moravians underwent significant change and a period of increasingly intensive political and cultural contact between the two lands arose.


Author(s):  
Manju Dhariwal ◽  

Written almost half a century apart, Rajmohan’s Wife (1864) and The Home and the World (1916) can be read as women centric texts written in colonial India. The plot of both the texts is set in Bengal, the cultural and political centre of colonial India. Rajmohan’s Wife, arguably the first Indian English novel, is one of the first novels to realistically represent ‘Woman’ in the nineteenth century. Set in a newly emerging society of India, it provides an insight into the status of women, their susceptibility and dependence on men. The Home and the World, written at the height of Swadeshi movement in Bengal, presents its woman protagonist in a much progressive space. The paper closely examines these two texts and argues that women enact their agency in relational spaces which leads to the process of their ‘becoming’. The paper analyses this journey of the progress of the self, which starts with Matangini and culminates in Bimala. The paper concludes that women’s journey to emancipation is symbolic of the journey of the nation to independence.


Author(s):  
Geoffrey Jones

This chapter lays out the principal aims of the book and its contribution. It shows that business drove unprecedented wealth creation over the last two hundred years but the cost was unprecedented environmental pollution resulting in new geological era known as the Anthropocene Age. Already in the nineteenth century there was resistance which mostly took the form of elite conservation movements. Overlooked has been the advent of green entrepreneurs who sought to create new firms to facilitate sustainability. Today there is much discussion about green entrepreneurship, but these figures predate today’s green entrepreneurs by a century. The book breaks new ground in business history by looking at these many small and marginal entrepreneurial figures, who were often highly unconventional. The book will explore what has motivated green entrepreneurs in each generation, how they build businesses, and whether they achieved their goals.


2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 581-597 ◽  
Author(s):  
James A. Jaffe

With relatively few exceptions, personal petitions from individuals have received much less attention from historians than those from groups in the public political sphere. In one sense, personal petitions adopted many of the same rhetorical strategies as those delivered by a group. However, they also offer unique insights into the quotidian relationship between the people and their rulers. This article examines surviving personal petitions to various administrators at different levels of government in western India during the decades surrounding the East India Company’s conquests. The analysis of these petitions helps to refine our understanding of the place of the new judicial system in the social world of early-nineteenth-century India, especially by illuminating the discourse of justice that petitioners brought to the presentation of their cases to their new governors. The conclusion of this article seeks to place the rhetoric of personal petitioning within the larger context of mass political petitioning in India during the early nineteenth century.


2009 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
SUBHO BASU

AbstractThrough a study of hitherto unexplored geography textbooks written in Bengali between 1845 and 1880, this paper traces the evolution of a geographic information system related to ethnicity, race, and space. This geographic information system impacted the mentality of emerging educated elites in colonial India who studied in the newly established colonial schools and played a critical role in developing and articulating ideas of the territorial nation-state and the rights of citizenship in India. The Bengali Hindu literati believed that the higher location of India in such a constructed hierarchy of civilizations could strengthen their claims to rights of citizenship and self-government. These nineteenth century geography textbooks asserted clearly that high caste Hindus constituted the core ethnicity of colonial Indian society and all others were resident outsiders. This knowledge system, rooted in geography/ethnicity/race/space, and related to the hierarchy of civilizations, informed the Bengali intelligentsia's notion of core ethnicity in the future nation-state in India with Hindu elites at its ethnic core.


Author(s):  
Haye Hinrichsen

Western music is predominantly based on the equal temperament with a constant semitone frequency ratio of 21/12. Although this temperament has been in use since the nineteenth century and in spite of its high degree of symmetry, various musicians have repeatedly expressed their discomfort with the harmonicity of certain intervals. Recently it was suggested that this problem can be overcome by introducing a modified temperament with a constant but slightly increased frequency ratio. In this paper we confirm this conjecture quantitatively. Using entropy as a measure for harmonicity, we show numerically that the harmonic optimum is in fact obtained for frequency ratios slightly larger than 21/12. This suggests that the equal temperament should be replaced by a harmonized stretched temperament as a new standard.


2014 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 370-398 ◽  
Author(s):  
RADHIKA GUPTA

AbstractShi‘i scholars from India have been a sizeable presence in seminaries in Iran and Iraq, both historically and today. Yet there is a dearth of scholarship on Shi‘i linkages between India and West Asia, with the exception of historical work on the patronage of shrine cities in Iraq by centres of Shi‘ism in India. Departing from this geographical and historical focus, this paper lends insight into contemporary religious networks between India and West Asia, using the example of the Twelver Shi‘a in Kargil, a region located on India's ‘border’ with Pakistan in the province of Kashmir. Kargili scholars travelled overland via Afghanistan or by sea from Bombay to Basra to study in seminaries in Iraq and Iran from the nineteenth century onwards. Increasing fluency in Urdu in post-colonial India enabled them to connect with Shi‘i institutions in other parts of India, which mediate religious, cultural, and financial flows from a transnational Shi‘ite realm. These networks ofreligiouslearning are not only conduits for the transmission of textual, doctrinal knowledge, but also for politico-religious ideologies that are selectively harnessed, and often exaggerated, to effect significant social and political changes in micro-locales. While local conflicts are over-determined by the evocation of transnational links, they also reflect, even if only through rhetorical and partial reproduction, doctrinal and politico-religious schisms among Shi‘i leaders in West Asia. This is illustrated by an ethnographic account of the activities undertaken and contestations provoked by the Imam Khomeini Memorial Trust in Kargil, a modernist reform movement that has selectively appropriated Khomeini's revolutionary ideologies to instigate social change and shape local politics and religious practice in Kargil.


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