2. Colonial India: impoverishment

2017 ◽  
pp. 11-33
Author(s):  
Craig Jeffrey
Keyword(s):  
Institutional Development ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Indian Nationalism ◽  
Self Rule ◽  
Three Phases

‘Colonial India: impoverishment’ considers why India is poor and divided. India has been wealthy historically and so the ubiquity of poverty in contemporary India needs to be explained with reference to colonial history rather than imagined as somehow an inevitable feature of the subcontinent. Three phases in the imperial dominance of the English (then British after 1707) in India are identified and the ruinous impact of British imperialism is described. Despite the ‘impoverishment’ of India there were some positive aspects to British rule, particularly in infrastructural and institutional development. The combination of economic and political disempowerment seeded Indian nationalism, with self-rule finally achieved in 1947.

scholarly journals Peasants, Colonialism, and Sovereignty: The Garo rebellions in eastern India

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
SANGHAMITRA MISRA
Keyword(s):  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Northeastern India ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Core Elements ◽  
Colonial Archive ◽  
History Of

Abstract This article studies two seismic decades in the history of the Garo community, marked out in colonial records as among the most violent and isolated people that British rule encountered in eastern and northeastern India. Through a densely knit historical narrative that hinges on an enquiry into the colonial reordering of the core elements of the regional political economy of eastern and northeastern India, it will train its focus on the figure of the rebellious Garo peasant and on the arresting display of Garo recalcitrance between 1807 and 1820. Reading a rich colonial archive closely and against the grain, the article will depart from extant historiography in its characterization of the colonial state in the early nineteenth century as well as of its relationship with ‘tribes’/‘peasants’ in eastern and northeastern India. A critique of the idea of primitive violence and the production of the ‘tribe’ under conditions of colonial modernity will occupy the latter half of the article. Here it will argue that the numerous and apparently disparate acts of headhunting, raids, plunder, and burning by the Garos on the lowlands of Bengal and Assam were in fact an assembling of the first of a series of sustained peasant rebellions in this part of colonial India—a powerful manifestation of a community's historical consciousness of the loss of its sovereign self under British rule.

Medical Culture in Transition: Mughal Gentleman Physician and the Native Doctor in Early Colonial India

2008 ◽  
Vol 42 (5) ◽  
pp. 853-897 ◽  
Author(s):  
SEEMA ALAVI
Keyword(s):  
Well Being ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Colonial Medicine ◽  
Medical Culture ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
Medical Authority ◽  
Mughal Empire ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Public Servant ◽  
British Rule

AbstractThe essay explores a Greco-Arabic healing tradition that arrived in India with the Muslims and evolved with the expansion of the Mughal Empire. It came to be known as unani in the sub-continent. It studies unani texts and its practitioners in the critical period of transition to British rule, and questions the idea of ‘colonial medicine’ being the predominant site of culture and power. It shows that in the decades immediately preceding the early 19th century British expansion, unani underwent a critical transformation that was triggered by new influences from the Arab lands. These changes in local medical culture shaped the later colonial intrusions in matters related to health. The essay concludes that the pro-active role of the English Company and the wide usage of the printing press only added new contenders to the ongoing contest over medical authority. By the 1830s this complex interplay moved health away from its previous focus on individual aristocratic virtue, to the new domain of societal well being. It also projected the healer not merely as a gentleman physician concerned with individual health, but as a public servant responsible for the well being of society at large. These changes were rapid and survived the reforms of 1830s. They ensured that ‘colonial medicine’ remained entangled in local contestations over medical authority.

scholarly journals Tuberculosis, Housing and the Colonial State: Hong Kong, 1900-1950

2003 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 653-682 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Jones
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Laissez Faire ◽  
Imperial State ◽  
Indirect Rule

As Tak-Wing Ngo has argued, the ‘dominant’ view of colonial rule in Hong Kong is one of a state which governed through ‘a deliberate policy of indirect rule—a combination of economic laissez-faire and political non-intervention’. It depicts a government which was disengaged from the population, preferring to see the colony as a trading opportunity, whilst leaving the condition of the peoples it held sway over to the philanthropy and humanitarianism of the colony's Chinese elites. This view of British rule was even supported by the primary representative of the imperial state when Sir David Trench admitted in 1970 that social policy, in the sense of responding to the needs of the populace, only began in the colony in 1953. But as Tak-Wing Ngo has argued, these ‘established narratives’ of Hong Kong's colonial history need to be reassessed and a more nuanced approach adopted to reveal the complexity of even Hong Kong's seemingly simple ‘colonial state-society’ relations.

Another Colonial History: How Cosmopolitan Was Cavafy's Contemporary Alexandria?

boundary 2 ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 89-121
Author(s):  
Alexander Kazamias
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
British Colonialism ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Colonial Oppression ◽  
The Impact ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
Late Ottoman ◽  
Alternative Reading

This essay provides an alternative reading of modern Alexandria's social and cultural history as a basis for a better contextualization of Cavafy's poetry. It revisits the watershed year 1882, which marks the city's destruction after its bombardment by the British fleet, using new evidence from a little-known diary by the nineteen-year-old Cavafy. It then examines the overlooked context of Alexandria's late Ottoman cosmopolitanism and shows its decisive contribution to the city's modern culture, including Cavafy's own diasporic ethnic group, the Egyptian Greeks. Finally, the argument reassesses some prevalent misconceptions about the impact of British rule in Egypt, including the problematic view that it purportedly enhanced the city's cosmopolitan life. Instead, the article shows that British colonialism sought to constrain Alexandrian cosmopolitanism, whereas Cavafy, and a circle of radical intellectuals around him, actively defended it through nuanced expressions of opposition to the injustices of colonial oppression in Egypt, Cyprus, and Greece.

The Gandhian Mazzini: Democratic Nationalism, Self-rule, and Non-violence

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabrizio de Donno
Keyword(s):  
Direct Influence ◽  
Indian Nationalism ◽  
Self Rule ◽  
The Impact

This chapter explores Mahatma Gandhi's engagement with Mazzinian ideas. It seeks to address the ways in which Giuseppe Mazzini and his doctrine became ‘Gandhian’; that is, how they were appropriated by the Indian as he incorporated them in his own thought. It is argued that the Gandhian use of Mazzini does not point to a direct influence of the Italian on the Indian, but to a reworking of the Italian's ideas based on the impact they had already had on Indian nationalism prior to Gandhi's appearance. While building on the Mazzinian foundation of Indian liberalism, but in contrast to the extremists who had given prominence to the insurrectionist aspects of Mazzini's thought and practice, Gandhi erects his own non-violent form of democratic nationalism, thus providing a non-violent interpretation of the Italian's figure and doctrine, and framing Mazzini's ‘truth’ within Gandhi's project of self-rule.

The Role of India in the Indo-Pacific

2019 ◽  
pp. 85-109
Author(s):  
Timothy Doyle ◽  
Dennis Rumley
Keyword(s):  
Regional Identity ◽  
Government Policies ◽  
Indian Government ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
Indian Nationalism ◽  
Defence Policy ◽  
Strategic Space ◽  
Geopolitical Imaginations

The construct of the ‘Indo-Pacific’ as a new ‘regional’ identity is garnering recognition in both foreign and defence policy institutions in India. Although the Indo-Pacific concept is currently ‘in vogue’, the essential motivations behind India’s self-proclaimed—and alleged centrality—in the Asian strategic space, are not particularly new. In fact, in this chapter we posit that it is quite the opposite: the construction of the ‘region’ possesses enduring historical connections to British imperialism alongside Indian nationalism. The works of post-independence Indian strategic thinkers such as Caroe and Panikkar will be further drawn upon to illustrate how their traditional geopolitical rationales and arguments remain integral to contemporary Indian framings of the Indo-Pacific. Examples taken from current Indian government policies and projects, such as Project Mausam, will be utilized to contextualize these concepts and geopolitical imaginations.

Imperial Vision, Colonial Prisons:

2018 ◽  
Vol 77 (2) ◽  
pp. 146-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mira Rai Waits
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Primary Objective ◽  
Moral Reform ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Built Form ◽  
British Rule ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
New System

Prison construction was among the most important infrastructural changes brought about by British rule in nineteenth-century India. Informed by the extension of liberal political philosophy into the colony, the development of the British colonial prison introduced India to a radically new system of punishment based on long-term incarceration. Unlike prisons in Europe and the United States, where moral reform was cited as the primary objective of incarceration, prisons in colonial India focused on confinement as a way of separating and classifying criminal types in order to stabilize colonial categories of difference. In Imperial Vision, Colonial Prisons: British Jails in Bengal, 1823–73, Mira Rai Waits explores nineteenth-century colonial jail plans from India's Bengal Presidency. Although colonial reformers eventually arrived at a model of prison architecture that resembled Euro-American precedents, the built form and functional arrangements of these places reflected a singularly colonial model of operation.

Imagining the Post-colonial Lawyer: Legal Elites and the Indian Nation-State, 1947–1967

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 156-186
Author(s):  
Alexander WILLIAMS
Keyword(s):  
Public Law ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Indian Politics ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Supreme Court Of India ◽  
British Rule ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Indian Nation

AbstractA key feature of British rule in India was the formation of a class of elite metropolitan lawyers who had an outsized role within the legal profession and a prominent position in Indian politics. This paper analyzes the response of these legal elites to the shifting social and political terrain of post-colonial India, arguing that the advent of the Indian nation-state shaped the discursive strategies of elite lawyers in two crucial ways. First, in response to the slipping grasp of lawyers on Indian political life and increasing competition from developmentalist economics, the elite bar turned their attention towards the consolidation of a national professional identity, imagining an ‘Indian advocate’ as such, whose loyalty would ultimately lie with the nation-state. Second, the creation of the Supreme Court of India, the enactment of the Constitution of India, and the continuous swelling of the post-colonial regulatory welfare state partially reoriented the legal elite towards public law, particularly towards the burgeoning field of administrative law.

Self-Rule and the Problem of Peoplehood in Colonial India

2019 ◽  
Vol 114 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
NAZMUL S. SULTAN
Keyword(s):  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Moral Self ◽  
Indian People ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Self Rule ◽  
Indefinite Future

This article theorizes the colonial problem of peoplehood that Indian anticolonial thinkers grappled with in their attempts to conceptualize self-rule, or swaraj. British colonial rule drew its legitimacy from a developmentalist conception of the colonized people as backward and disunited. The discourse of “underdeveloped” colonial peoplehood rendered the Indian people “unfit” for self-government, suspending their sovereignty to an indefinite future. The concept of swaraj would be born with the rejection of deferred colonial self-government. Yet the persistence of the developmentalist figuration of the people generated a crisis of sovereign authorization. The pre-Gandhian swaraj theorists would be faced with the not-yet claimable figure of the people at the very moment of disavowing the British claim to rule. Recovering this underappreciated pre-Gandhian history of the concept of swaraj and reinterpreting its Gandhian moment, this article offers a new reading of Gandhi's theory of moral self-rule. In so doing, it demonstrates how the history of swaraj helps trace the colonial career of popular sovereignty.

Anthropologists and Viceroys: Colonial knowledge and policy making in India, 1871–1911

2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 217-258 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. J. FULLER
Keyword(s):  
Policy Making ◽  
Rural Society ◽  
Land Policy ◽  
British India ◽  
Policy Documents ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Agrarian Policy ◽  
Indian Nationalism ◽  
Late Nineteenth

AbstractThe anthropology of caste was a pivotal part of colonial knowledge in British India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Denzil Ibbetson and Herbert Risley, then the two leading official anthropologists, both made major contributions to the study of caste, which this article discusses. Ibbetson and Risley assumed high office in the imperial government in 1902 and played important roles in policy making during the partition of Bengal (1903–5) and the Morley-Minto legislative councils reforms (1906–9); Ibbetson was also influential in deciding Punjab land policy in the 1890s. Contemporary policy documents, which this article examines, show that the two men's anthropological knowledge had limited influence on their deliberations. Moreover, caste was irrelevant to their thinking about agrarian policy, the promotion of Muslim interests, and the urban, educated middle class, whose growing nationalism was challenging British rule. No ethnographic information was collected about this class, because the scope of anthropology was restricted to ‘traditional’ rural society. At the turn of the twentieth century, colonial anthropological knowledge, especially about caste, had little value for the imperial government confronting Indian nationalism, and was less critical in constituting the Indian colonial state than it previously had been.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document