Nationalism, Modernity, and the “Woman Question” in India and China

2013 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 273-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanjay Seth

The nationalist struggle to bring about the end of colonial rule in India, and the Republican and communist struggles to arrest and reverse the humiliation and the “carve-up” of China by foreign powers, were both closely allied to the struggle to become modern. Indeed, the two goals were usually seen to be so closely related as to be indistinguishable: a people had to start becoming modern if they were ever to be free of foreign domination, and they had to gain sovereignty and state power in order to undertake the laborious but necessary task of building a strong, prosperous, and modern nation. Thus in India, as in China, political movements from the latter nineteenth century sought to found a sovereign nation free from domination by a Western power or powers, and also sought to make this putative nation and its people “modern,” both as a necessary means towards the nationalist end and as an end in itself.

2021 ◽  
pp. 378-409
Author(s):  
Anne Reinhardt

The steamship networks that linked China and India from the mid-nineteenth century were a key facet of the British colonial presence in both places. By the early twentieth century, shipping was an important arena of nationalist mobilization in both as well. In China and India, the nationalist shipping entrepreneurs Lu Zuofu and Walchand Hirachand used both commercial and political means to dismantle the colonial shipping system, foster national autonomy, and envision decolonized futures. Although these entrepreneurs did not a have any direct contact with one another, the unmistakable parallels in their actions and arguments underscore the importance of the historical and structural connections between China and India between the 1920s and 1950s as these entrepreneurs contended with a shipping system of global reach. This chapter compares Lu and Hirachand’s strategies to develop national shipping power under colonial/semi-colonial rule and as a part of decolonization.


Author(s):  
Anthony Gorman

This chapter traces the development of the radical secular press in Egypt from its first brief emergence in the 1870s until the outbreak of World War I. First active in the 1860s, the anarchist movement gradually expanded its membership and influence over subsequent decades to articulate a general social emancipation and syndicalism for all workers in the country. In the decade and a half before 1914, its press collectively propagated a critique of state power and capitalism, called for social justice and the organisation of labour, and promoted the values of science and public education in both a local context and as part of an international movement. In seeking to promote a programme at odds with both nationalism and colonial rule, it incurred the hostility of the authorities in addition to facing the practical problems of managing and financing an oppositional newspaper.


1985 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Toyin Falola

The view that Ibadan society in the nineteenth century did not discriminate against strangers, irrespective of their origins in Yorubaland, is now firmly entrenched in the literature. To be sure, Ibadan, a new nineteenth-century Yoruba city-state, founded as a consequence of the political crises of the early decades of the century, did maintain an ‘open door’ policy to strangers, many of whom went there as adventurers, craftsmen and traders, hoping to acquire wealth and fame. This article, however, controverts the view that Ibadan society gave the strangers and the indigenes equal opportunities to wealth and power. It argues that all the key political offices went only to the Oyo-Ibadan group which dominated the city-state. Strangers were also not allowed to participate fully in the leading heights of the economy, with the result that most of the wealthy citizens were also of Oyo-Yoruba origin.In the 1890s discrimination against strangers was such that a number of moves were made to expel them. However, the British, who imposed colonial rule on Ibadan in 1893, were against the expulsion of strangers.


Itinerario ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
O.N. Njoku

At the close of the nineteenth century, that is on the eve of colonial rule in Igboland, Igbo metal industry was flourishing. Production had attained a high level in the range and the quality of output. The output included agricultural equipment, traps and guns as well as title insignia and ornaments, mosdy made of copper and brass. The demand for die smiths' products were widespread and seemingly insatiable. To serve the need of dieir widely dispersed customers and patrons, Igbo smiths from Abiriba, Agulu Amokwe, Agulu Umana, Awka, and Nkwere undertook regular tours of parts of soudi-eastern Nigeria and even beyond – up to die Niger-Benue confluence area; past die Edo country to Ondo Yorubaland; and to the Bamenda district of die Cameroons. The superiority of Igbo metalworking led, in some of these places, to the demise of the local industry.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Schwecke

Starting in the late nineteenth century, colonial rule in India took an active interest in regulating financial markets beyond the bridgeheads of European capital in intercontinental trade. Regulatory efforts were part of a modernizing project seeking to produce alignments between British and Indian business procedures, and to create the financial basis for incipient industrialization in India. For vast sections of Indian society, however, they pushed credit/debt relations into the realm of extra-legality, while the new, regulated agents of finance remained incapable (and unwilling) of serving their needs. Combining historical and ethnographic approaches, the book questions underlying assumptions of modernization in finance that continue to prevail in postcolonial India, and delineates the socioeconomic responses they produced, and studies the reputational economies of debt that have emerged instead – extra-legal markets embedded into communication flows on trust and reputation that have turned out to be significantly more exploitative than their colonial predecessors.


1986 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 322-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
A.J. Stockwell

In the nineteenth century the British, Dutch, French and Russians bit deep into the Islamic world. European colonial power rested on the active support of Moslem rulers who, as leaders of clearly defined and hierarchical societies possessed of laws and monarchs, were attractive collaborators in the exercise of imperialism. With a pragmatism born of frontier experience, Europeans reached agreements with Islamic regimes throughout Asia and Africa. The dictum of Usuman dan Fodio — “The government of a country is the government of its king. If the king is Moslem, his land is Moslem” — was echoed in many a European statement on the principles and practices of colonial rule. The British, for their part, struck deals with Indian princes and Fulani emirs, with the Egyptian Khedive and the Sultan of Zanzibar, with the royal houses of the Arab world and the rulers of the Malay states.


Author(s):  
C. A. Bayly

This chapter considers the appropriation and deployment of the writings and image of Giuseppe Mazzini by the first generation of Indian liberal nationalists, notably the Bengali political leader Surendranath Banerjea. Mazzini's emphasis on the sympathetic union of the Italian people, manifested in popular festivals, proved attractive to Indian leaders struggling with issues of cultural and religious difference. His modernist appeal to the ‘religion of mankind’ resonated with writers and publicists committed to lauding the great Indian civilization of the past, yet arguing, publicly at least, for a break with ritual and caste hierarchy. Mazzini's emphasis on education, particularly women's education, and his suspicion of monarchy also spoke to Indian social and political reformers of this era. The chapter concludes by contrasting the affective, democratic nationalism espoused by Mazzini and Banerjea with ‘statistical liberalism’. The latter comprised the emerging critique of colonial rule, by writers such as Dadabhai Naoroji who reformulated contemporary political economy, to argue for protectionism and industrial development in India.


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