Epilogue

2021 ◽  
pp. 235-242
Author(s):  
Manu Sehgal
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Military Spending ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Scarce Resources ◽  
Executive Authority ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Sovereign Authority ◽  
Colonial Order

The early colonial order gave way to a recognizably extractive and coercive colonial rule which stretched across the long nineteenth century. Scholarly debates about the overlap between the late colonial and postcolonial polities in twentieth century South Asia have generally not traced the antecedents of an institutional structure of governance that commits scarce resources and political will in expensive projects of military aggrandizement. The disdain for civilian bodies/rule, placing military spending beyond the purview of public debate, unchecked executive authority in war-making, violent assertion of sovereign authority, aggressively defined borders, special bodies of law and zones of exception where civil rule and liberties are declared to be inapplicable—owe much to the deep structures of early colonial rule.

Sovereignty, Territoriality, and Law

2021 ◽  
pp. 71-120
Author(s):  
Manu Sehgal
Keyword(s):  
Coercive Force ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Legal Personality ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Military Conflicts ◽  
Sovereign Authority ◽  
Military Law ◽  
Military Discipline

This chapter seeks to analyze the changing meaning of ‘peace’ under an early colonial regime which was perpetually at war. ‘Peace’ in early colonial South Asia no longer meant the absence of conflict, but rather a period when problems of war assumed an urgent significance. From paying soldier’s arrears incurred during military conflicts to disciplining them in times when the Company state was not formally at war—‘peace’ was no longer the opposite of war. Rather it was the fleeting opportunity to re-tool the apparatus of colonial war-making. Conquest did not occur in a legal vacuum. This chapter analyses debates about military law and its significance for the early colonial regime’s claims to sovereign authority. Jurisdictional jockeying between competing sources of law went well beyond the need to maintain military discipline. Examining these debates opens up an unexplored world in which we can understand important questions relating to the territoriality of early colonial rule, the legal personality of the Company state and efforts to compare Britain’s garrisoning of Ireland with the organization of coercive force in South Asia.

Creating an Early Colonial Order

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manu Sehgal
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
British Raj ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Military Violence ◽  
Sovereign Authority ◽  
Colonial Order ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Military

This book explains the origins of colonial rule and its dependence on large-scale military violence in eighteenth-century South Asia. By the final quarter of the long eighteenth century, war-making was not incidental to the elaboration of an infrastructure of extractive domination. The changing capacity of the early colonial regime to organize conquest with increasing efficiency was originative of a complex of laws, ideas, conception of sovereign authority, bureaucratic innovations enmeshed in a political economy of conquest that formed a distinctive early colonial order for South Asia. Colonialism—familiar to historians of the British Raj as coercive authoritarian domination—did not emerge fully formed in early nineteenth-century South Asia. Colonial conquest raised a series of important questions which are at the heart of this book: How was territory to be conquered? How was conquest to be explained and understood? How was the weight assigned to the military in colonial societies justified as an ideology of rule? In answering these questions this early colonial order cast a long shadow across the colonial and the postcolonial periods.

“In that One the Ālif is Missing”: Eunuchs and the Politics of Masculinity in Early Colonial North India

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 73-116
Author(s):  
Nicholas Abbott
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
East India Company ◽  
North India ◽  
Self Perception ◽  
Successor State ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
British East India Company ◽  
Sovereign Authority ◽  
Bodily Difference

AbstractAlthough ostensibly gendered as men and frequently maintaining independent, patriarchal households, enslaved eunuchs (khwājasarās) in pre- and early colonial regimes in South Asia were often mocked for their supposed effeminacy, bodily difference, and pretensions to normative masculinity. In the Mughal successor state of Awadh (1722-1856), such mockery grew more pronounced in the wake of growing financial demands from the British East India Company and attempts by eunuchs to alienate property with wills and testamentary bequests. Through examples of verbal derision directed at eunuchs, this essay shows that not only did ideas of normative masculinity serve as a vehicle for Awadh’s rulers to defend their sovereign authority from colonial encroachment, but that notions of normative manhood continued to inform eunuchs’ own self-perception into the nineteenth century.

Intra-Asian Competition and Collaboration against the West: The N.Y.K. Bombay Line, Tata & Sons, and Indian Cotton at the End of the Nineteenth Century

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 277-293
Author(s):  
Shigeru Akita
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Chinese Market ◽  
The West ◽  
Cotton Industry ◽  
Export Industry ◽  
British Raj ◽  
Economic Exploitation

Abstract The traditional and orthodox interpretation of the British Raj (colonial rule in India) characterizes it in terms of the economic exploitation of India. However, recent historical studies have focused on the revival or development of the Indian cotton industry at the turn of the twentieth century. This article pays special attention to the rapid development of the Indian cotton-spinning industry as an export industry for the Chinese market and its implications for intra-Asian competition.

Catalogue of Tamil manuscripts in the Library of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine

1990 ◽  
Vol 122 (2) ◽  
pp. 359-369
Author(s):  
S. Gunasingam
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
South Asia ◽  
History Of Medicine ◽  
British Empire ◽  
South Asian ◽  
African Countries ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
History Of

Since the time South Asia, together with other Asian and African countries, became an integral part of the British Empire, the significance of manuscripts, published works and other artefacts, relating to those regions has stimulated continued appreciation in the United Kingdom, albeit with varying degrees of interest. It is interesting to note that the factors which have contributed in one way or another to the collecting of South Asian I material for British institutions vary in their nature, and thus illuminate the attitudes of different periods. During the entire nineteenth century, the collectors were primarily administrators; for most of the first half of the twentieth century, it was the interest and the needs of British universities that led to the accumulation of substantial holdings in many academic or specialist libraries.

The Bakungu Chiefs of Buganda under British Colonial Rule, 1900–1930

1969 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 309-322 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Twaddle
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Institutional Changes ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
Political Relationships ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
New Situation ◽  
Primary Materials

In 1959 C. C. Wrigley published ‘The Christian revolution in Buganda’. an important essay summarizing a decade of intensive research into Buganda politics during the nineteenth century. There he demonstrated how ‘Ganda society had undergone, immediately before the advent of British imperial power, a genuine revolution, which had brought about drastic changes in ideology and in the structure as well as the personnel of government and that as a result of these [and other] changes it was uniquely fitted to cope with the new situation which confronted it in the last years of the nineteenth century’. This essay seeks to reconstruct an intriguing attempt made by the Bakungu client-chiefs who triumphed in that ‘Christian revolution’ to perpetuate their power in the Buganda kingdom by making further institutional changes during the second decade of the twentieth century. But first it is necessary to discuss the general factors shaping political relationships between these client-chiefs and their European rulers during the first and third decades of this century. In this it is possible to take account not only of several secondary sources published since the appearance of Wrigley's article nearly ten years ago, but also of certain primary materials which have recently come to light.

scholarly journals COMMERCE, MERCHANTS AND MARKETS IN THE BRAHMAPUTRA VALLEY c. 1800-1900

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (11) ◽  
pp. 180-186
Author(s):  
Nabanita Sharma
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic Policy ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
Economic Structure ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Commercial Activities ◽  
Brahmaputra Valley ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
National Archives ◽  
Trading Activities

Trade and commerce in the Brahmaputra valley of colonial Assam is understudied. This paper attempts to study the trade and commercial activities in the valley while keeping in mind the transition from pre-colonial to colonial rule. The late Ahom sources do not speak purposefully about trading activities in the valley. Early colonial sources term the region as backward and averse to trade. The valley came under colonial rule in 1826 with the Treaty of Yandabo. Were the first few decades of the nineteenth century in the Brahmaputra valley backward in matters of commerce? How different was the latter half of the nineteenth century? Analysis of Ahom chronicles, archival sources, and personal papers available in the National Archives of India has helped in finding structural changes in trade and commercial activities in the valley in the century under study. These findings help in understanding the nature of colonial economic policy and present economic structure of the region better.

Shipping Nationalism in India and China, 1920–52

2021 ◽  
pp. 378-409
Author(s):  
Anne Reinhardt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Direct Contact ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
China And India ◽  
National Autonomy ◽  
Structural Connections ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
India And China ◽  
Global Reach

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.

Aspects of Turkana Leadership during the Era of Primary Resistance

1976 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Lamphear
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Military Leader ◽  
Military Leaders ◽  
Primary Resistance ◽  
The North ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
The Military ◽  
Considerable Period

After a considerable period of conflict with nineteenth-century traders, hunters and ‘explorers’, the Turkana of northwestern Kenya actively resisted the occupation of their country by the Imperial forces of British East Africa and Uganda during the second and third decades of the twentieth century. At first, this primary resistance was largely in the hands of war-leaders, notably Ebei, the most important military leader of the southern sections. Bitterness engendered by Hut Taxes and other unpopular British policies led to the brief ascendancy of Koletiang, an influential southern diviner, until he was imprisoned in 1911. Again the resistance leadership fell to the military until especially brutal ‘punitive actions’ in 1915 had the effect of consolidating resistance in the north. At this point, Lowalel, another powerful diviner, became the spiritual patron of the war-leaders and their followers, reaffirming the close co-operation which traditionally had existed between religious and military leaders in Turkana society. So charismatic and innovative was Lowalel's leadership that he amassed armies several thousand strong and was joined by other peoples including the Merille and Dongiro, as well as by the forces of the Ethiopian Empire, in resisting the extension of British colonial rule.

scholarly journals The Mantle Odes

2011 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 138-140
Author(s):  
Francis Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Literary Interpretation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Modern Reader ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

Non-Muslims, perhaps blinded by the claims of their own faiths, have longunderestimated Muslim reverence for the Prophet Muhammad. By thesame token, they have paid relatively little attention to Muslim traditionsof praising the Prophet, whether it be the naths sung by Sufi qawwali musiciansin South Asia, the maulid lectures on the first twelve days of Rabi al-Awwal ‒ or the biographies of the Prophet, which have become so numerousover the past century. This is unfortunate because, intermingled withpraise for the Prophet, there are often other messages, which non-Muslimsneed to note if they are better to understand their Muslim neighbors.The Mantle Odes contains translations, and interpretations in their context,of three of the most highly prized poems in the Arab-Islamic traditionin praise of the Prophet. One poem dates from the time of the Prophet, thesecond from the thirteenth century AC under the Mamluks, and the thirdfrom Egypt under colonial rule in the early twentieth century. The author’saim is “to bring these Islamic devotional masterpieces into the purview ofcontemporary literary interpretation in a way that makes them culturallyrelevant and poetically effective for the modern reader, whether Muslim ornon-Muslim” (xi) ...

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