New Books in South Asian Studies
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1351
Carolien Stolte, “Philip Angel’s Deex-Autaers: ...
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 ...
66 min
1352
Anne M. Blackburn, “Locations of Buddhism: Colo...
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,
59 min
1353
Donna Landry, “Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses...
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.
66 min
1354
Susan Harris, “God’s Arbiters: Americans and th...
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,
66 min
1355
Peter Robb, “Richard Blechynden’s Calcutta Diar...
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 ...
66 min
1356
Nabil Matar and Gerald MacLean, “Britain and th...
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,
66 min
1357
Jeff Sahadeo, “Russian Colonial Society in Tash...
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,
66 min
1358
Marcus Franke, “War and Nationalism in South As...
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,
66 min
1359
Diane Kirkby and Catherine Coleborne, “Law, His...
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,
66 min
1360
Parna Sengupta, “Pedagogy for Religion: Mission...
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.
69 min
1361
Eugenia Herbert, “Flora’s Empire: British Garde...
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...
66 min
1362
Steve Inskeep, “Instant City: LIfe and Death in...
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,
34 min
1363
Philip Stern, “The Company-State: Corporate Sov...
‘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...
66 min
1364
Alexander Morrison, “Russian Rule in Samarkand,...
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,
66 min
1365
Chris Poullaos and Suki Sian, “Accountancy and ...
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,
66 min
1366
Yasmin Saikia, “Women, War, and the Making of B...
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...
56 min
1367
Vera Tolz, “Russia’s Own Orient: The Politics o...
Everyone knows that the late nineteenth-century Russian Empire was the largest land based empire around, and that it was growing yet- at fifty-five square miles a day, no less. But how did Moscow and St. Petersberg go about making the bewildering array...
66 min
1368
Cecilia Leong-Salobir, “Food Culture in Colonia...
Hobson-Jobson was not just about administration and geopolitics- the language of Empire extended to its culinary endeavours as well. Thus chota hazri, tiffin,and curry puffs at Peliti’s were the things that sustained an army of civil servants as they w...
66 min
1369
Mark Bradley, “Classics and Imperialism in the ...
The Greco-Roman world was the prism through which the British viewed their imperial efforts, and Mark Bradley’s compendium Classics and Imperialism in the British Empire (Oxford University Press, 2010) explores the various ways in which this reception ...
66 min
1370
Vinayak Chaturvedi, “Peasant Pasts: History and...
The odds are that if you don’t figure in an administration’s records, you won’t figure in the historical record. But what do you do to get into those records? Raising a ruckus is one way. But that works only if someone else hasn’t managed to raise more...
66 min
1371
Howard Spodek, “Ahmedabad: Shock City of Twenti...
As Ahmedabad, the chief city of Gujarat state in Western India, puts itself up as a contender for World Heritage status, Howard Spodek’s lovely book, Ahmedabad: Shock City of Twentieth Century India (Indiana University Press, 2011),
66 min
1372
Nile Green, “Bombay Islam: The Religious Econom...
Bombay (Mumbai), India, is a city that has never lacked chroniclers from Rudyard Kipling to Salman Rushdie to Suketu Mehta, bards of pluralism have written about Bombay’s divers religions and peoples and the interactions between them.
66 min
1373
Robert Parthesius, “Dutch Ships in Tropical Wat...
The Dutch broke the Portuguese commercial and colonizing monopoly in the East in 1595; the seal might have been said to have been set on this triumph when they took over the port of Melaka in 1641, effectively replacing the Portuguese as the masters of...
66 min
1374
Katharine E. McGregor, “History in Uniform: Mil...
Nugroho Notosusanto (1930-1985) never pursued a military career; but all the same he did his bit for the Indonesian armed forces. He was co-opted into the Armed Forces History Centre as a young academic, and dedicated the greater part of his life to wr...
66 min
1375
Tilman Nachtman, “Nabobs: Empire and Identity i...
The many penniless English servants of the East India Company who landed at Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta in the eighteenth-century were not terribly interested in uplifting the natives. They were, however, very keen to enrich themselves. And,
66 min