scholarly journals Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion

2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-84
Author(s):  
Mohsin Ali
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Unique Contribution ◽  
British East India Company ◽  
Muslim Minorities

Ilyse R. Morgenstein Fuerst’s book, Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857Rebellion: Religion, Rebels, and Jihad, is a masterful exploration of how animperial discourse of religion in the nineteenth-century defined Islam,Muslims, and jihad. Specifically, Fuerst calls attention to the significanceof the 1857 Rebellion by Indians against the British East India Company,and argues that British official histories of the Rebellion fundamentally alteredhow colonial officials, European scholars, and Indians thought andwrote about religion. Thus she builds on the work of previous scholars ofreligion such as Tomoko Masuzawa, who has argued that the concept ofuniversal religion is a constructed category, and David Chiddester, who hasshown how colonialism constructed both religions and races. Additionally,Fuerst’s book draws on historians such as Thomas Metacalf, who haveexplored the various ways the 1857 Rebellion transformed the business ofempire. However, Fuerst’s unique contribution lies in revealing the ways anofficial British discourse about Muslims and their supposed propensity forviolence, and the Indian Muslim engagement with this discourse, racializedand minoritized Muslims. This discourse presented as fact that all Muslimswere essentially homogenous and dangerous to imperial interests ...

The Chinese Repository and Western Literature on China 1800 to 1850

1973 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth L. Malcolm
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Chinese Government ◽  
Western Literature ◽  
Opium Trade ◽  
British East India Company

In the first decades of the nineteenth-century Western missionary activity, like the opium trade, was prohibited by the Chinese government. The Protestant missionaries, however, could not equal the independent opium traders in their evasion of the Chinese authorities. As well, they had to contend with the opposition of the British East India Company, which theoretically monopolized Anglo-Chinese commerce at Portuguese Macao.

scholarly journals Palmer and Company: an Indian Banking Firm in Hyderabad State

2013 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 1157-1184 ◽  
Author(s):  
KAREN LEONARD
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Business Practices ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
British East India Company

AbstractAlthough the misreading of Hyderabad's early nineteenth century banking firm, Palmer and Company, as scandalous, illegal, and usurious in its business practices was contested at the time in Hyderabad, and at the highest levels of the East India Company in both Calcutta and London, such conspiracy theories have prevailed and are here challenged. The Eurasian William Palmer and his partner, the Gujarati banker, Benkati Das, are best understood as indigenous sahukars or bankers. Their firm functioned like other Indian banking firms and was in competition with them in the early nineteenth century as Hyderabad State dealt with the increasing power of the British East India Company and its man-on-the-spot, the Resident. Historians need to look beyond the English language East India Company records to contextualize this important banking firm more accurately.

Global histories, local exclusions

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mandy Sadan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Internal Dynamics ◽  
Tea Industry ◽  
British East India Company ◽  
Local Political Institutions ◽  
Political Exclusion ◽  
Kinship Relations ◽  
Assam Tea

This chapter discusses the encounters between the British East India Company in early nineteenth-century Assam and Singpho communities who had expanded their territorial possessions in the region because of the regional disorder of the previous century. These encounters are placed in the context of changes in the nature of the state in Asia as well as in European trading empires, raising questions about the relevance of a simple dichotomy between notions of ‘state’ and ‘non-state’ at this time in this region. The effects of the nascent Assam tea industry are discussed in relation to Singpho migration and internal dynamics of kinship relations and the creation of local hierarchies. The failure of the Company to develop local political institutions that could map onto Singpho-Jinghpaw political culture is explored through the Singpho revolt of 1843 and the effect of this in creating a local outcome of political exclusion.

scholarly journals Dak Roads, Dak Runners, and the Reordering of Communication Networks

2012 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chitra Joshi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Communication Networks ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Physical Strength ◽  
British East India Company ◽  
History Of ◽  
Speed Up ◽  
Popular Images

SummaryWith the expansion of its territory in India in the first half of the nineteenth century, the British East India Company increasingly felt the need to widen postal networks and speed up communications. This essay looks at the crucial role of thedauriya(mail runner) in the development of postal networks by exploring the narratives around popular images of this “traditional” communication worker. Accounts of the lives of mail runners were interwoven with stories of their extraordinary physical strength and the dangers they negotiated along the way, their encounters with tigers, and their commitment to carry the imperial mail through rain and flood. Behind such narratives lay a history of regulations, a story of the making of a “modern” postal system. This entailed an effort to rationalize the system, calculating the speed of running, ensuring regularity, projecting estimated times of travel, and enforcing contracts. This essay aims to understand the logic of these changes, and the implications of these regulations.

Identity and Invisibility

2018 ◽  
pp. 26-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd Nachowitz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
James Cook ◽  
Extant Literature ◽  
European Contact ◽  
British East India Company

Shipping logs reveal that the first Indians to set foot on New Zealand soil were two young lascars from Pondicherry who arrived on a French East India Company ship in 1769—the year that James Cook first visited the country. Indian arrival in New Zealand was, therefore, contemporaneous with first European contact, a fact never before recognized in the extant literature on nation-building. Since then hundreds of Indian sepoys and lascars accompanied British East India Company ships to New Zealand, many going through Australian ports seeking work with sealing expeditions and on timber voyages. In the early nineteenth century, some of the lascars began to jump ship, marry local Maori women and settled down in New Zealand. This chapter argues that Indians in New Zealand can claim a history that goes as far back as the earliest Maori–European (Pakeha) contact.

“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.

Corporate Belligerency and the Delegation Theory from Grotius to Westlake

Grotiana ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 349-370
Author(s):  
Rotem Giladi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
Critical Reflection ◽  
The State ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Constitutional History ◽  
War Powers ◽  
British East India Company ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Empire

Abstract This article starts with a critical reflection on John Westlake’s reading of the history of empire and the English/British East India Company – for him, essentially, the proper concern of ‘constitutional history’ rather than international law. For Westlake, approaching this history through the prism of nineteenth-century positivist doctrine, the Company’s exercise of war powers could only result from state delegation. Against his warnings to international lawyers not to stray from the proper boundaries of international legal inquiry, the article proceeds to recover Hugo Grotius’s theory of corporate belligerency in his early treatise De iure praedae. For Grotius, corporations could wage public war on behalf of the state yet, at the same time, were in law capable of waging private war in their own right. The article proceeds to reflect on the practice of corporate belligerency in the centuries separating Westlake and Grotius; it concludes with observations on the implications of Grotius’s theory of corporate belligerency today.

Delhi in Transition, 1821 and Beyond

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
English Translation ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Multiple Sources ◽  
Original Manuscript ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
The Times ◽  
First Time ◽  
The City

Commissioned by the English East India Company to write about contemporary nineteenth-century Delhi, Mirza Sangin Beg walked around the city to capture its highly fascinating urban and suburban extravaganza. Laced with epigraphy and fascinating anecdotes, the city as ‘lived experience’ has an overwhelming presence in his work, Sair-ul Manazil. Sair-ul Manazil dominates the historiography of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century compositions on Delhi in Persian and Urdu, and remains unparalleled in its architecture and detailed content. It deals with the habitations of people, bazars, professions and professionals, places of worship and revelry, and issues of contestation. Over fifty typologies of structures and several institutions that find resonance in the Persian and Ottoman Empires can also be gleaned from Sair-ul Manazil. Interestingly, Beg made no attempt to ‘monumentalize’ buildings; instead, he explored them as spaces reflective of the sociocultural milieu of the times. Delhi in Transition is the first comprehensive English translation of Beg’s work, which was originally published in Persian. It is the only translation to compare the four known versions of Sair-ul Manazil, including the original manuscript located in Berlin, which is being consulted for the first time. It has an exhaustive introduction and extensive notes, along with the use of varied styles in the book to indicate the multiple sources of the text, contextualize Beg’s work for the reader and engage him with the debate concerning the different variants of this unique and eclectic work.

The Novel in English in Malaya and Singapore to 1950

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
East Asia ◽  
English Language ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Civil Servant ◽  
Civil Servants ◽  
East India Company ◽  
South East Asia ◽  
The Novel ◽  
English East India Company

This chapter looks at the representations of the former British Straits Settlements in English fiction from 1819 to 1950, discussing both British literary works that are located in South East Asia and English-language novels from Singapore and Malaysia. Although over the centuries, Europeans of various nationalities had located, intermarried, and established unique cultures throughout the region, writing in the English language at first remained confined to travel accounts, histories, and some largely anecdotal fiction, mostly by civil servants. English East India Company employees wrote about the region, often weaving anecdotal sketches into their historical, geographical, and cultural descriptions. Civil servant Hugh Clifford and Joseph Conrad are the two most prominent writers of fiction set in the British Straits Settlements during the nineteenth century; they also epitomize two opposing camps in representing the region.

scholarly journals Mass Petitioning, Education Reform, and the Development of Political Culture in Madras, 1839–1842

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Scott Travanion Connors
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Education Reform ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
The Creation

Abstract This article explores the emergence of reformist sentiment and political culture in Madras in the mid-nineteenth century. Moreover, it contributes to, and expands upon, the growing body of literature on colonial petitioning through a case-study of a mass petition demanding education reform. Signed in 1839 by 70,000 subjects from across the Madras presidency, the petition demanded the creation of a university that would qualify western-educated Indians to gain employment in the high public offices of the East India Company. Through an analysis of the lifecycle of this education petition, from its creation to its reception and the subsequent adoption of its demands by the Company government at Fort St George, this article charts the process by which an emergent, politicized public engaged with, and critiqued, the colonial state. Finally, it examines the transformative effect that the practice of mass petitioning had on established modes of political activism and communication between an authoritarian colonial state and the society it governed.

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