The sixth season of the Indian Premier League recently concluded, and once again off-field problems cast light on the league’s growing pains. For the fifth year in a row, no Pakistani players were selected for the league’s teams,

It’s a classic historical question: Why the West and not the Rest? Answers abound. So is there anything new to say about it? According to Prasannan Parthasarathi, there certainly is. He doesn’t go so far as to say that other proposed explanations are f...

Justin Jones‘ book, Shi’a Islam in Colonial India: Religion, Community and Sectarianism (Cambridge University Press, 2012) is all about Lucknow, and colonial India, and Shia Islam – and the links and interlinks between these and the outer world.

In Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India (Duke University Press, 2006) ) Amanda Weidman (scroll down to see her profile) explores how the colonial encounter profoundly shifted the ways South Indian...

Have you seen North Indian vocalists improvise? Their hands and voices move together to trace intricate melodic patterns. If we think that music is just made of sequences of notes, then this motion may seem quite puzzling at first.

Presenting- and being granted an audience- at the court of a foreign potentate was the way to gain legitimacy, acceptance, and often, protection to be able to trade in the territory. Of course arriving at a court contained an element of risk; and not e...

It was the last in a long line of ‘Acts’ designed to ensure better colonial governance for the Indian sub-continent. It was an Act which was vociferously opposed by, amongst others, Winston Churchill. It is the Act upon which the Constitution of modern...

What does a wedding in Karbala in the year 680 have to do with South Asian Muslims today? As it turns out, this event informs contemporary ideas of personal piety and social understanding of gender roles. The battlefield wedding of Qasem and Fatimah Ku...

During the 1960s attendance fell at cricket grounds across England. Just as the Church of England lost members in droves in the same period, it appeared that this other pillar of English tradition was becoming irrelevant amidst the social and cultural ...

In 1658, a Dutch East India Company merchant by the name of Philip Angel presented a gift manuscript to Company Director Carel Hartsinck. It was intended to get into Hartsinck’s good books; Angel had been recalled to the VOC-headquarters at Batavia in ...

In this important contribution to both the study of South Asian Buddhism as well the burgeoning field of Buddhist modernity, Anne Blackburn‘s Locations of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka (The University of Chicago Press,

This is a book about horses. Donna Landry‘s Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture (The John Hopkins University Press, 2009) is all about how horses were a means of cultural exchange between the Orient and England.

Mark Twain called it “pious hypocrisies.” President McKinley called it “civilizing and Christianizing.” Both were referring to the U.S. annexation of the Philippines in 1899. Susan K. Harris‘ latest book, God’s Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines,

Richard Blechynden came to Calcutta in 1782 as a twenty two year old, and stayed there for the rest of his life, working as a surveyor and architect. From 1791 he maintained daily diaries, and it is these that Peter Robb has so magnificently re-worked ...

Nineteenth-century observers would say that the British Empire was an Islamic one; be that as it may, before Empire there was trade- and lots of it. Nabil Matar and Gerald MacLean‘s book, Britain and the Islamic World,

Konstantin von Kaufmann, Governor-General of Russian Turkestan from 1867 until his death in 1882, wanted to be buried in Tashkent if he died in office; so that, he said, ‘all may know that here is true Russian soil,

North East India is, as Marcus Franke’s War and Nationalism in South Asia: The Indian State and the Nagas (Routledge, 2011) all too convincingly demonstrates, often considered peripheral to ‘India (or even South Asia) proper.’ A densely wooded,

English common law is prevalent across large parts of the world; and all thanks to the British Empire. It was not just culture and commerce that came along to the colonies; English law, as Diane Kirkby and Catharine Coleborne‘s new book, Law, History,

What is the relationship between religion, secularization, and education? Parna Sengupta, Associate Director of Introductory Studies at Stanford University, explores their connections as she reexamines the categories religion, empire, and modernity.

Horticulture is not an activity normally associated with Empire building. But Eugenia Herbert‘s book Flora’s Empire: British Gardens in India (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). But ‘garden imperialism’ was all too common in the Ind...

In his new book, Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi (Penguin Press, 2011), Steve Inskeep, host of NPR’s Morning Edition, chronicles the story of Karachi’s seemingly instantaneous population explosion, from only 350,

‘Traders to rulers’ is an enduring caption insofar as the English East India Company is concerned. But were they ever just traders to start off with, and they eventually morph into mere temporal rulers unconcerned with the dynamics of the global econom...

Great Britain and Russia faced off across the Pamirs for much of the nineteenth century; their rivalries and animosities often obscuring underlying commonalities; these were, after all, colonial Empires governing ‘alien’ peoples,

For an empire supposedly founded on the back of trade, not much attention has been paid to how the finances of the British Empire were organized- or to the people who organized them. Chris Poullaos‘ and Suki Sian‘s pioneering compendium,

It’s almost a cliche to say that war dehumanizes those who participate in it – the organizers of violence, those who commit violent acts, and the victims of violence. In her new book, Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971 (Duke Uni...