Book Reviews : C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), xiv + 412 pp. Cloth, $64.95

1999 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 349-351
Author(s):  
W. R. Pinch
Keyword(s):  
Social Communication ◽  
Intelligence Gathering ◽  
Cambridge University

Empire and information: intelligence gathering and social communication in India, 1780–1870. By C. A. Bayly. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xiv+412. £40.00. ISBN 0-521-57085-9.

1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 601-602
Author(s):  
JOHN LENNARD
Keyword(s):  
Police Officer ◽  
Social Communication ◽  
Alternative Explanation ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
Local Study ◽  
Intelligence Gathering ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Princely State ◽  
Anglo Indian

For the interdisciplinarian, Anglo-Indian historiography can be frustrating. In working on Paul Scott's Raj quartet (four profoundly historical novels about Anglo-India, 1942–7, better known as TV's The jewel in the crown) I have faced such questions as: whether it is reasonable to believe that in 1947 a senior British police officer who owned Pathan clothes and brown make-up used them professionally, passing as an Indian to gather intelligence; what credence the officer's probable homosexuality gives an alternative explanation, that cultural transvestism and Indian guise served private sexual rather than public professional ends; and whether the resonances with Thuggee in the costumed and made-up officer's murder by strangulation (in a Muslim-ruled, Hindu-majority, not-yet-acceded princely state in late July 1947) are of any historical merit. But the archetypes in which writers of fiction can combine scope and particularity are unavailable to the historian, too often confined to the dense and satisfying footnotery of the local study claimed as typical, or happily wandering the open generalizations of the all-India history claimed as exemplary; and for the critic wishing to test the historical probity of a fiction the result is Hobson's choice between easily-found but tangential treatments, and trawling memoirs for the reticent implications of conventional Anglo-Indian understatement.

Book Reviews

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 225-246
Author(s):  
Kariane Westrheim ◽  
Michael Gunter ◽  
Yener Koc ◽  
Yavuz Aykan ◽  
Diane E. King ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Religious Minorities ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Kurdish Conflict

Adem Uzun, “Living Freedom”: The Evolution of the Kurdish Conflict in Turkey and the Efforts to Resolve it. Berghof Transitions Series No. 11. Berlin: Berghof Foundation, 2014. 48 pp., (ISBN: 978-3-941514-16-4).Ebru Sönmez, Idris-i Bidlisi: Ottoman Kurdistan and Islamic Legitimacy, Libra Kitap, Istanbul, 2012, 190 pp., (ISBN: 978-605-4326-56-3). Sabri Ateş, The Ottoman–Iranian Borderlands: Making a Boundary, 1843-1914, New York; Cambridge University Press, 2013. 366., (ISBN: 978-1107033658).  Choman Hardi, Gendered Experiences of Genocide: Anfal Survivors in Kurdistan-Iraq. Farnham, Surrey and Burlington Vermont: Ashgate, 2011, xii + 217 pp., (ISBN: 978-0-7546-7715-4).Harriet Allsopp, The Kurds of Syria: Political Parties and Identity in the Middle East, London and New York, I.B. Tauris, 2014, 299 pp., (ISBN: 978-1780765631).Khanna Omarkhali (ed.), Religious Minorities in Kurdistan: Beyond the Mainstream [Studies in Oriental Religions, Volume 68], Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2014, xxxviii + 423 pp., (ISBN: 978-3-447-10125-7).Anna Grabole-Çeliker, Kurdish Life in Contemporary Turkey: Migration, Gender and Ethnic Identity, London: I.B. Taurus, 2013, 299 pp., (ISBN: 978-1780760926).  

Book Reviews

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 209-228
Author(s):  
Martin Van Bruinessen ◽  
Michael M. Gunter ◽  
Joost Jongerden ◽  
Michiel Leezenberg ◽  
Stanley Thangaraj
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Academic Publishing ◽  
Ethnic Cleansing ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
City College ◽  
Tennessee Technological University ◽  
Technological University

Michael M. Gunter (ed.), Routledge Handbook on the Kurds, London and New York: Routledge, 2019, 483 pp., (ISBN: 9781138646643). Reviewed by Martin van Bruinessen, Utrecht University, The Netherlands Kardo Bokani, Social Communication and Kurdish Political Mobilisation in Turkey, Balti, Republic of Moldova: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2017, 252 pp., (ISBN: 978-3-330-33239-3) Reviewed by Michael M. Gunter, Tennessee Technological University, United States Emel Elif Tugdar & Serhun Al, eds., Comparative Kurdish Politics in the Middle East: Actors, Ideas, and Interests, Cham: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2018, pp. 235, (ISBN: 978-3319537146) Reviewed by Joost Jongerden, Wageningen University, The Netherlands Christoph Markiewicz, The Crisis of Kingship in Late Medieval Islam: Persian Emigres and the Making of Ottoman Sovereignty, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, 364 pp, (9781108684842). Reviewed by Michiel Leezenberg, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Thomas Schmidinger, The Battle for the Mountain of the Kurds: Self-Determination and Ethnic Cleansing in the Afrin Region of Rojava, Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2019, 192 pp. (ISBN: 978-1629636511). Reviewed by Stanley Thangaraj, City College of New York, United States

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