Britain In India 18581947

The revised edition of Robert Stern's book brings India's story up to date. Since its original publication in 1993, much has altered and yet central to the author's argument remains his belief in the remarkable continuity and vitality of India's social systems and its resilience in the face of change. This is a colourful, readable and comprehensive introduction to modern India. In a journey through its family households and villages, the author explains its long-lived and little understood caste and class systems, its venerable faiths and extraordinary ethnic diversity, its history as 'the jewel in the crown' of British imperialism and its post-Independence career as a major agricultural and industrial nation. While paradoxes abound in an India which is constantly transforming, Stern demonstrates how and why it remains the largest and most enduring democracy in the developing world.

The archives are generally sites where historians conduct research into our past. Seldom are they objects of research. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya traces the path that led to the creation of a central archive in India, from the setting up of the Imperial Record Department, the precursor of the National Archives of India, and the Indian Historical Records Commission, to the framing of archival policies and the change in those policies over the years. In the last two decades of colonial rule in India, there were anticipations of freedom in many areas of the public sphere. These were felt in the domain of archiving as well, chiefly in the form of reversal of earlier policies. From this perspective, Bhattacharya explores the relation between knowledge and power and discusses how the World Wars and the decline of Britain, among other factors, effected a transition from a Eurocentric and disparaging approach to India towards a more liberal and less ethnocentric one.

With a profusion of anecdotes conveying the character of India under British rule. Farwell offers a panoramic survey of the Indian army during the 90 years between the Sepoy Revolt and the births of independent India and Pakistan ...

“The ‘Slumdog’ Phenomenon” addresses multiple issues related to “Slumdog Millionaire” and, in the process, provides new ways of looking at this controversial film. Each of the book’s four sections considers a particular aspect of the film: its relation to the nation, to the slum, to Bollywood and its reception. The volume provides a critical overview of the key issues and debates stemming from the film, and allows readers to reexamine them in light of the anthology’s multiple perspectives.

‘Britain in India, 1858–1947’ seeks to trace the last 90 years of British rule in the light of modern historical debates. The volume examines the ambiguities of British rule that followed from the post-Mutiny settlement: the tensions between an authoritarian bureaucracy and the promise of a liberal vision of the future, and between imperial interests and the growing coordination of Indian aspirations for self-rule. The volume analyses these tensions with reference to contemporary historical debates, and traces them through changing international relations and world wars to Indian independence and partition in 1947.

An alternative view of imperial history, exploring the pioneering ways in which South Asians within Britain engaged in radical discourse and political activism.

This book examines the ruptured characteristics of colonialism in nineteenth-century India. It connects the British East India Company’s efforts at the bourgeoisation of India with the Revolt of 1857. The volume shows how the mutiny of Indian sepoys in the British Indian army became a popular uprising of peasants, artisans and discontented aristocrats against the British. Tracing the rationale and consequences of this conflict, the monograph highlights how newly introduced political, economic and agrarian policies as part of industrial Britain’s colonial policy wreaked havoc, resulting in high land revenue assessment and its harsh mode of collection, rural indebtedness, steady immiseration of peasants, widespread land alienation, destitution and suicide. Using rare archival sources, this book will be an important intervention in the study of nineteenth-century India, and will deeply interest scholars and researchers of modern Indian history and politics.

How colonial governments in Asia and Africa financed their activities and why fiscal systems varied across colonies reveals the nature and long-term effects of colonial rule.