Social Clubs in a Princely State: The Case from Hyderabad, Deccan

2021 ◽  
pp. 037698362110520
Author(s):  
Benjamin B. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Urban Environment ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Direct Control ◽  
Social Clubs ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Colonial Expansion ◽  
Princely State ◽  
British Colonial

Social clubs began in India in the late eighteenth century in the wake of British colonial expansion. Clubs flourished in colonial India’s two great administrative divisions: those areas under direct control and the indirectly controlled princely states of India. This article explores the role of clubs in Hyderabad city, the capital city of India’s largest and wealthiest princely state. Here, club dynamics operated differently. By the nineteenth century, princely state urban capitals supported two centres of power: the local Indian ruler and that of the British Resident. These multiple centres of power forced clubs in this urban environment to be less attentive to difference among members (race and class) and more attentive to reaching across divisions. An examination of clubs in a princely state urban environment, thus, reveals an Indo-British clubland, largely marked by forms of social coexistence and cooperation.

The Judicial Agreements in Yorubaland 1904–1908

1971 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 607-627
Author(s):  
O. Adewoye
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Colonial Expansion ◽  
Administration Of Justice ◽  
Royal Courts ◽  
Firm Basis ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
English Law ◽  
Important Position ◽  
Potent Factor

The role of law in British expansion in Africa has received insufficient attention from historians, yet there is nothing new in the use of law as an instrument of imperial or colonial expansion. Law occupied an important position in the organization of the Roman Empire. The Norman kings strengthened their hold on medieval England by centralizing the administration of justice through the establishment of royal courts whose varied jurisdictions eventually became predominant throughout the whole country.This paper discusses the circumstances in which English law was introduced into Yorubaland early in this century largely through a series of judicial agreements signed with a number of indigenous rulers. The primary consideration behind the making of the agreements was the protection of British commercial interests, but the importance of the agreements really transcends this objective. They provided a firm basis for the establishment of British colonial rule in this part of Nigeria—by making provisions for the punishment of criminal offences, by introducing a machinery of justice which struck at the sovereignty of the Yoruba states, and by ensuring the supremacy of English law over the indigenous laws and customs. The agreements also marked the beginning of the introduction into Yorubaland of new legal ideas and principles, which were a potent factor of social change.

The Mughal Empire

2021 ◽  
pp. 751-788
Author(s):  
Rajeev Kinra
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
Ethnic Communities ◽  
Mughal Empire ◽  
Agrarian Economy ◽  
Colonial Expansion ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Economic Tools ◽  
Modern Era

From its establishment in 1526 by Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur, the Mughal Empire would grow over roughly the next two centuries into one of the largest, most populous, and most influential states of the early modern era. This chapter provides a historical overview of the Mughal Empire from the early conquests of Babur to the early phase of British colonial expansion in India in the eighteenth century. The chapter outlines the ideological underpinnings of the empire, drawing upon Turko-Mongol, Persianate, Greco-Hellenic, Islamicate, and Indic ideas of rulership, as well as the practicalities of building an effective administrative system accommodating the diverse religious, tribal, and ethnic communities and social classes of the Indian subcontinent. Finally, the chapter analyzes the empire’s economic tools for managing a vast agrarian economy, and some of the artistic developments reconciling Indian and Persian traditions with the mosaic of religious and intellectual ideas flourishing at the Mughal court.

The Self-Abstracting Letters of War

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Wertheimer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
James Madison ◽  
National Interests ◽  
The Public ◽  
The People ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Individual Self ◽  
The Relationship

John Henry, the British spy, seemed to understand what it took to move the powerful to action, using secret letters to his handlers in British colonial administration as an incitement to Constitutionally declared war. My discussion here relies on that metanarrative of “abstraction” to produce a conversation between its historical actors. Though Henry wrote his letters on Federalist activities to Sir James Craig, Governor-General of the Canadas, he saved copies for his own use. Ultimately, he found the means to sell them to James Madison in February of 1812, at a moment when the president was equally keen to know of the activities of his political opponents. Madison published the letters almost as soon as he received them. In some sense then, the Henry letters, though addressed to Craig, were written for Madison. And Madison’s own subsequent rhetorical and legal moves towards war came in “conversation” with Henry. Henry abstracts authority and the public so as not to risk the ruin of the fictive and novelistic, but to harness it and its mediational effects. It redefines the relationship between the people and the Constitution, from the irrationally voiced nation, which diffuses authority, to a proper realignment with Presidential power. The move is a containment of the role of individual self-hood in the process of naming national interests and declaring war. In the process, that republican devotion to bottom-up persuasive transparency, idealized in the contemporaneous media of letters, print, and opinion, is critically diminished. He invites us to consider how late eighteenth century networks of information—letters, secret communiqués, war messages to Congress--abstract the self (its “absurd” opinions, its “inconsistent” rationales) to the benefit of a new (masculinized) executive. The executive model of authority will replace the irregular multitude of republican political culture.

Anglicanism and Pan-Evangelicalism

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alister McGrath
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
The Future ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Evangelical Movement

This chapter considers the emergence of the complex relationship between Anglicanism and a broader evangelical movement (often known as ‘pan-evangelicalism’) which transcends denominational boundaries. The origins of this relationship goes back to the sixteenth century, but became especially important from the eighteenth century onwards as a result of the ‘evangelical revival’ in England, and its extended influence. The expansion of British colonial power was an important factor in consolidating and extending an evangelical influence within Anglicanism, especially on account of the role of entrepreneurial individuals and mission societies in propagating the Christian faith. The chapter concludes with reflections on the future of this relationship, given contemporary developments within both Anglicanism and evangelicalism.

scholarly journals Waste Dumps in Latvia: Former Landfilling, Consequences and Possible Recultivation

2012 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-90
Author(s):  
Juris Burlakovs ◽  
Magnuss Vircavs
Keyword(s):  
Urban Planning ◽  
Urban Environment ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Contamination Level ◽  
Dump Site ◽  
General Overview ◽  
Waste Dumps ◽  
Made In

Particular attention in this article is paid to the research of two waste dumps in the capital city of Latvia – Riga, which are planned to be re-cultivated in the nearest future and one site, which is former toxic hazardous soil dump site, where the remediation of site is of priority need. The present study is giving a general overview of contamination level in two waste dumps in Riga, which were made in the period from 50-ties to 70-ties of the 20th century, also the case of hazardous soil dump site formed in a period of more than 100 years is described. Planned actions as well as direct remediational technologies to reduce the poisonous impact to the urban environment and the role of re-cultivation in the urban planning in general are proposed.

History as Self-Representation: The Recasting of a Political Tradition in Late Eighteenth-Century Eastern India

1998 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 913-948 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kumkum Chatterjee
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Eastern India ◽  
Political Tradition ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
English East India Company

If power is mediated by knowledge, then the early decades of British colonial rule in India were indeed, as Ghulam Hussain Khan Tabatabai, the intellectual and historian par excellence of those times wrote, a time of ‘half-knowledge’.The decades between 1757 and 1772 witnessed the implantation of this colonial regime in Eastern India through the transformation of the English East India Company from a mercantilist trading corporation into the paradoxical status of ‘merchant-sovereign and the sovereign merchant’ at the same time. The role of sovereign thrust upon the officials of the company the far from easy task of administering this society in ways that were most conducive to the extraction of the largest possible surplus from it for its new masters.

Mapping Senegambia: Legacies of Ambition and the Failure of an Early Colonial Venture

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 212-231
Author(s):  
Sven Outram-Leman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Senegal River ◽  
Colonial Expansion ◽  
Secure Access ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
River Niger

Britain's short-lived Province of Senegambia (1765–1783) was part of an expansion effort in the region driven by a desire to secure access to the gum trade of the Senegal river. Drawing on Britain's knowledge of France's dealings with the Upper-Senegal region it was complemented by the adoption of French cartography, edited to illustrate a new colonial identity. It is argued here that there was an additional motive of developing closer contact with the African interior. This pre-dates the establishment of the African Association in 1788 and its subsequent and better-known expeditions to the River Niger. In contrast to the French, however, the British struggled to engage with the region. This paper approaches the topic from a perspective of cartographic history. It highlights Thomas Jeffery's map of ‘Senegambia Proper’ (1768), copied from Jean Baptiste Bourguingnon d'Anville's ’Carte Particuliére de la Côte Occidentale de l'Afrique' (1751) and illustrative of several obstacles facing both British map-making and colonial expansion in mid-eighteenth century Africa. It is argued that the later enquiries and map-making activities of the African Association, which were hoped to lead to the colonisation of West Africa, built upon these experiences of failure in Senegambia.

"‘A Peculiar Gift of Providence": The Power-Imbalance Caused by Gift-Giving in Millenium Hall

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisia Snyder
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Power Imbalance ◽  
Gift Giving ◽  
The Gift

Sarah Scott's eighteenth-century novel Millenium Hall canvasses the role of gift-giving in the dynamics heteronormative-domestic, economic, and spiritual relationships. The pharmakon of the gift plays a central role in Scott's understanding of philanthropy, and the construction of her female-inhabited, female-run utopia. This article's principle occupation is to show that all instances of gift-giving in Millenium Hall create power-imbalances between the superior giver and the inferior receiver; however, Sarah Scott's female utopia constructs the most preferable type of subservience.

FOREIGN SERVANTS IN AN INDIAN PRINCELY STATE BHOPAL (19TH — EARLY 20TH CENTURIES)

2020 ◽  
pp. 151-163
Author(s):  
E. Yu. Vanina ◽  
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Central India ◽  
High Status ◽  
Domestic Servants ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
Princely State ◽  
Local Residents ◽  
British Colonial

Bhopal, one of the ‘princely states’ and vassals of the British Empire (Central India), enjoyed special favour with its sovereign. Throughout a century, it was ruled by four generations of women who gained themselves, in India and outside, the reputation of enlightened and benevolent monarchs. Archival documents and memoirs allow glancing at the hitherto hidden world of domestic servants who not only ensured the comfortable and luxurious life of the princely family, but its high status too, both for fellow Indians and for British colonial administrators. Among the numerous servants employed by the Bhopal rulers, freely hired local residents prevailed. However, the natives of some other countries, quite far from India, were conspicuous as well: the article highlights West Europeans, Georgians and Africans (“Ethiopians”). In the princely household, foreign servants performed various functions. While British butlers and Irish or German nannies and governesses demonstrated the ruling family` s “Westernized” lifestyle, Georgian maids and African lackeys showcased the affluence and might of the Bhopal queens. Some foreign servants came to Bhopal by force: the reputation of ‘progressive’ was no obstacle for the Bhopal queens to use slave labour. When such cases became public, the British authorities responded with mild reproaches: condemning slavery, they nevertheless loathed any discord with their trusted vassals.

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