Stories from the margins: Indian business communities in the growth of colonial Singapore

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 521-539
Author(s):  
Jayati Bhattacharya
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
Ethnic Communities ◽  
National Narratives ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Trade Networks ◽  
Social Landscape ◽  
History Of ◽  
Structure Of Trade

Colonial Singapore witnessed the movement and settling of Chinese, Malay, Indian, Arab, European and other mercantile groups as a free port and emporium of the British Empire. This social landscape was defined by boundaries between the different ethnic communities, often drawn up by the British, in contrast to the cosmopolitan exchanges of the market. This article focuses on the Indian business communities which had played a significant role in maritime trade networks since pre-colonial times and continued to be a part of Singapore's developing society and economy in the British period. A minority in the colonial era port city and largely confined within intra-ethnic economic and social circuits, Indians participated in the complex colonial structure of trade and credit alongside British, European and Asian traders and merchant houses, as brokers, agents, and retailers. British hegemony over the Indian subcontinent was both an advantage and a disadvantage for these Indian trading communities. This article brings to light the history of Indian networks in the colonial transnational flows of capital and entrepreneurship, and their patterns of integration into and role in the development of Singapore, a role marginalised in the scholarship and the national narratives alike by a focus on the large-scale Indian labour migrations.

A New Shahrazad

2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 372-386
Author(s):  
Andrew Amstutz
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Middle East ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
British India ◽  
World War ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Autobiographical Writing ◽  
History Of

Abstract In 1945, Mahmooda Rizvia, a prominent Urdu author from Sindh, published a travel account of her journey across the Arabian Sea from British India to Iraq during World War II. In her travel account, Rizvia conceptualized the declining British Empire as a dynamic space for Muslim renewal that connected India to the Middle East. Moreover, she fashioned a singular autobiographical persona as an Urdu literary pioneer and woman traveler in the Muslim lands of the British Empire. In her writings, Rizvia focused on her distinctive observations of the ocean, the history of the Ottoman Empire, and her home province of Sindh's location as a historical nexus between South Asia and the Middle East. In contrast to the expectations of modesty and de-emphasis on the self in many Muslim women's autobiographical narratives in the colonial era, Rizvia fashioned a pious, yet unapologetically self-promotional, autobiographical persona. In conversation with recent scholarship on Muslim cosmopolitanism, women's autobiographical writing, and travel literature, this article points to the development of an influential project of Muslim cosmopolitanism in late colonial Sindh that blurred the lines between British imperialism, pan-Islamic ambitions, and nationalism during the closing days of World War II.

Exogenous Colonialism: Java Sugar between Nippon and Taikoo before and during the Interwar Depression, c. 1920–1940

2009 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 477-515 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. ROGER KNIGHT
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Sugar Industry ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
Cane Sugar ◽  
Key Factors ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
China Market ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
Asian Mainland

AbstractThis paper discusses the commercial history of the Java sugar industry in the interwar decades of the 1920s and 1930s. Java's late colonial industry had a uniquely exogenous character, in that, amongst the world's major producers of cane sugar in the late colonial era, it was singularly devoid of metropolitan or quasi-metropolitan markets. Instead, it sought its markets pre-eminently on the Asian ‘mainland’ to its north and northwest. The Indian subcontinent formed one such market, but East Asia formed the second, and it is the Java industry's fortunes in China and Japan that provide the focus of the present paper. This focus highlights the extent to which the partial collapse of the industry in the mid-1930s related to factors altogether more complex than a simple fall in consumption and drop in prices associated with the interwar Depression. Fundamentally, it was evolving economic autarchy throughout east Asia, encouraged by Depression conditions, which lay at the heart of the Java sugar industry's problems in this sector of its market. Key factors were Java's ambivalent relationship with an expanding but crisis-ridden Japanese sugar ‘empire,’ and the effect on its long-standing links with British sugar refineries in Hong Kong because of the latter's increasing difficulties in the China market. In tandem, they underscored the commercial hazards inherent in Java sugar's exogenous situation.

Glossing in the Linguistic Survey of India

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aimée Lahaussois
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
History Of ◽  
One Step ◽  
Large Scale Survey

Summary In this article, I explore glossing practices in the period surrounding the publication of the Linguistic Survey of India (LSI), the large-scale survey of languages spoken on the Indian subcontinent at the turn of the 20th century, under the stewardship of George Abraham Grierson (1851–1941). After a brief discussion of the reasons that the LSI constitutes a useful corpus for studying glossing practices, I provide a detailed examination of the glossing practices used in the text specimens which accompany language descriptions in the LSI. I then contrast these practices with glossing in materials produced both prior to and subsequent to the LSI, in order to place the glossing practices established by Grierson within a historical context, thereby contributing a description of one step in the history of glossing of descriptive linguistic materials.

Empire, migration and the NHS

2018 ◽  
pp. 60-90
Author(s):  
Julian M. Simpson
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
British Empire ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
Time Lag ◽  
Medical Graduates ◽  
System P ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
Staffing Needs

Chapter 2 connects the history of the NHS to the history of the British empire and post-war migration. The arrival in Britain of the South Asian medical graduates who became GPs was the product of a very specific post-imperial context that existed in the forty years following the establishment of the NHS. The post-war migration of doctors was not a spontaneous or new phenomenon-it is linked to the long history of British medicine in South Asia and is an amplification of longstanding imperial flows of doctors to Britain. Medicine on the Indian subcontinent had been fundamentally shaped by its imperial past. Conversely, in a growing NHS, their labour offered a solution to the staffing needs of the new organisation, particularly in junior posts, in unpopular specialties and in industrial areas. There was a time lag between the formal end of empire and the dismantling of its legacies such as the freedom of doctors to move to Britain and their ability to gain recognition for their qualifications. This explains how between the 1940s and the 1980s South Asian doctors came to take on such an important role in the British healthcare system.

scholarly journals Reappraisals of the Academy Movement

2001 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 216-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim Tolley ◽  
Nancy Beadie
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public High Schools ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Educational Discourse ◽  
The Public ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
History Of

The presence of academies in the United States spans roughly three centuries. Originating in the colonial era, academies spread across the country by mid-nineteenth century. Such institutions generally served students between the ages of eight and twenty-five, providing a relatively advanced form of schooling that was legally incorporated to ensure financial support beyond that available through tuition alone. According to one contemporary source, by 1850 more than 6,100 incorporated academies existed in the United States, with enrollments nine times greater than those of the nation's colleges. Nineteenth-century supporters portrayed academies as exemplars of the nation's commitment to enlightenment and learning; opponents argued that they were harmful to the public interest. Those in favor of a large-scale system of public high schools dismissed academies as irrelevant and outmoded institutions. The culmination of this controversy is well known, because it is reiterated in every secondary text on the history of American education. As a widespread system of public higher schooling supplanted the academies in the twentieth century, private and independent schools dropped out of the mainstream of American educational discourse. The following essays seek to recover something of the long history of academies in the United States and to reconsider the historical significance of these institutions in society.

scholarly journals From Land-Locked to Land-Linked?

2021 ◽  
pp. 37-56
Author(s):  
Ashley Scott Kelly ◽  
Xiaoxuan Lu
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Political Transitions ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Mekong Region ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Historical Periods

AbstractThis chapter, From land-locked to land-linked? Laos within a continuum of connectivity in the Mekong region, constructs a history of infrastructure-building in Laos understood through economic connectivity. This chapter challenges the dominant narrative of a de-historicized, often linear progression from land-locked to land-linked or from isolation to integration by contextualizing the contemporary imaginations and developments of Laos within the broader social, economic and political transitions across the Mekong region. We examine the malleable identities of “Laos,” “border” and “infrastructure” in the strategic importance of the Mekong region and the struggles to control and reshape its interconnectivity, especially during the period between colonial-era obscuration and more recent revitalization of the Southern Silk Road. Rather than comprehensive or strictly chronological, this chapter focuses on three loosely defined historical periods: the colonial period from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, the Cold War period from the mid-twentieth century to late 1980s, and the post-Cold War period from the late 1980s until the present day. We ground the distinct histories of these periods in discourses specific to their times and places, each with their own geographic conception of the Mekong region and particular combination of socioeconomic and geopolitical imperatives driving investment in large-scale infrastructure projects.

scholarly journals The genetic history of the Indian subcontinent

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David G. Mahal
Keyword(s):  
Y Chromosome ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
Population Group ◽  
Ethnic Communities ◽  
Dna Test ◽  
Genetic History ◽  
Human Male ◽  
History Of ◽  
Male Specific ◽  
Random Change

The human male specific Y-chromosome passes from father to son essentially unchanged, but occasionally a random change, known as a mutation, occurs. These mutations, also called markers, serve as beacons and can be mapped. When geneticists identify a mutation in a DNA test, they try to determine when it first occurred and in which part of the world. Thus, the Y-chromosome haplogroup, which is a population group descended from a common ancestor, can be used to trace the paternal lines of men. The poster describes a research project that aims to identify the ancient geographical origins of key ethnic communities of the Indian subcontinent, based on their Y-DNA haplogroups.

scholarly journals The genetic history of the Indian subcontinent

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David G. Mahal
Keyword(s):  
Y Chromosome ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
Population Group ◽  
Ethnic Communities ◽  
Dna Test ◽  
Genetic History ◽  
Human Male ◽  
History Of ◽  
Male Specific ◽  
Random Change

The human male specific Y-chromosome passes from father to son essentially unchanged, but occasionally a random change, known as a mutation, occurs. These mutations, also called markers, serve as beacons and can be mapped. When geneticists identify a mutation in a DNA test, they try to determine when it first occurred and in which part of the world. Thus, the Y-chromosome haplogroup, which is a population group descended from a common ancestor, can be used to trace the paternal lines of men. The poster describes a research project that aims to identify the ancient geographical origins of key ethnic communities of the Indian subcontinent, based on their Y-DNA haplogroups.

From Landgrabbing to Landhunger: High Land Appropriation in the Plantation Areas of Sri Lanka during the British Period

1992 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-361 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Meyer
Keyword(s):  
Sri Lanka ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
Land Market ◽  
Sri Lankan ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Slash And Burn ◽  
History Of ◽  
Large Scale Land

In this contribution I propose to examine an aspect of Sri Lankan agrarian history which is often alluded to but rarely studied in depth: the process of high land appropriation for the development of coffee, tea, rubber and coconut plantations. The development of a land market in the Indian subcontinent is becoming a promising field of research for the study of imperial impact as a process at work in specific contexts.The Sri Lankan case differs from the Indian one in that land appropriation was originally meant for and followed by large scale land alienation to outsiders–the planters. This process has attracted the interest of most historians writing on the history of the Raj in Ceylon, but usually the only aspect stressed has been the appropriation by the Colonial State of forest and chena(land devoted to slash-and-burn cultivation) for sale to British planters.

Travancore's magnetic crusade: geomagnetism and the geography of scientific production in a princely state

2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 325-352 ◽  
Author(s):  
JESSICA RATCLIFF
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
Scientific Production ◽  
Observation Data ◽  
Time Data ◽  
Published Report ◽  
History Of ◽  
Princely State ◽  
Scientific Value

AbstractIn 1840 the raja of Travancore, Swathi Thirunal, would offer his government's assistance to the British Association for the Advancement of Science and its plan for a global system of magnetic observations. Over the next thirty years, the two directors of this princely state's observatory, John Caldecott and John Allan Broun, would pursue fundamental terrestrial magnetic research. Their efforts would culminate in the Trivandrum [Trevandrum] Magnetical Observations (1874). In what follows, the history of this publication is used to shed light on how and why a semi-autonomous princely state such as Travancore would engage the scientific community in Europe at this time. The article focuses in particular on the work of turning observation data into a published report and on how that labour would be distributed between the Indian subcontinent and Europe. Because the production of such reports required dozens of hands and decades of labour, its history can reveal much about the concrete working relationship between informal colony and imperial metropole within the British Empire. The Trivandrum Magnetic Observations were produced within a global economy of science in which Travancore sometimes had the upper hand. At the same time, data and scientific productions tended to accumulate in Europe (at least for a time), where ultimately the consumers of scientific products and the arbiters of ‘scientific value’ also largely remained. Within the sprawling economic, political and cultural infrastructures that linked geomagnetic research in Travancore and Europe, the relative strengths and weaknesses of each region would cut in different directions. The history of the production of the Trivandrum Observations brings to light this robustly interconnected geography of scientific production within the British Empire. It also reveals some of the processes by which ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’ in the sciences were then becoming differentiated.

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