Thomas R. Metcalf

THE NEW CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF INDIA

century and began exporting goods to Europe as well as to other parts of Asia. In a detailed analysis of the trading operations of European corporate enterprises such as the English and Dutch East India Companies, as well as those of private European traders, this volume considers how, over a span of three centuries, the Indian economy expanded and was integrated into the pre-modern world economy as a result of these interactions. The book also describes how the essentially market-determined commercial encounter between Europe and India changed in the latter half of the eighteenth century as the colonial relationship between Britain and the subcontinent was established. By bringing together and analysing the existing literature, the author provides a fascinating overview of the impact of European trade on the pre-colonial Indian economy which promises to be of great value to students of Indian, European and colonial history.

Art and Nationalism in Colonial India 1850-1922: Occidental Orientations

Part I. Prologue: 1. The phenomenon: occidental orientations Part II. The Age of Optimism: 2. Art education and Raj patronage 3. Salon artists and the rise of the Indian public 4. The power of the printed image 5. The artist as charismatic individual: Raja Ravi Varma Part III. The Great Wave of Cultural Nationalism: 6. Bengali patriots and art for the nation 7. Ideology of Swadeshi art 8. How the past was salvaged by Swadeshi artists 9. Westernisers and Orientalists : public battle of styles Part IV. Epilogue: l0. The passing of the age of oriental art.

‘Hard hands and sound healthy bodies’: Recruiting ‘coolies’ for natal, 1860–1911

In 1860 the colonial government of Natal, on the southeastern coast of South Africa, secured permission to import Indian labourers under bonds of indenture. In so doing they were following in the footsteps of Mauritius and the colonies of the West Indies. For these colonies the recruitment of Indians had provided an alternative source of labour to that of slaves, who, after emancipation in 1833, disdained, whenever they could, the back-breaking work of cutting cane. A booming sugar market in Britain, with the fact that cane was well suited to the semi-tropical coast of Natal, annexed in 1843, offered some prospect of a remunerative crop to that colonys fledgling white settler community. Natal had never possessed a slave economy. Confronted by the powerful Zulu state, and with ample thinly populated tribal land available in the interior, the colonists had no hope of coercing the resident African population to submit to the discipline of plantation labour. So, enviously eyeing their neighbours in Mauritius, they campaigned for the right to import Indian labour until finally their entreaties met with success. The prospect of prosperity at last lay before this impoverished British colony, annexed with no visible objective other than to keep it out of the hands of the Boers.

A Concise History of Modern India: CAMBRIDGE CONCISE HISTORIES

These include the third edition of, british colonial rule and sustained transformed india. His zeal boils over in synopsis. As a major player in india list of modern and more than player! Or as a major player in world metcalf is an integral to the country. Established seller since it was first under social and political theme of chicago the last decade. A whole city block with questions, of india first published in the best survey. Illustrations preface to the national wealth authors.

The Struggle Over Land Tenure in India, 1860–1868

The 1857 uprising, by shattering many of Britains most cherished beliefs about India, introduced a decade of controversy and reappraisal in many fields. At the center of this controversy stood land policy, for the land revenue was the heart of the administrative system, and the form through which outside events made their influence felt most strongly upon the structure of society. In collecting the land revenue, the Government had of necessity to settle responsibility for its payment on some person, and in so doing to define the rights in land of the various classes of society. This had a profound effect on the distribution of power within Indian society. Whichever class obtained the land settlement, and the rights and privileges it entailed, was in effect proprietor of the land, able to reduce all others to dependence upon its generosity. The British could insure the dominance of either peasant or landlord simply by manipulating the Record of Rights and assessment rolls.

Notes on the Sources for Local History in North India

Most research into modern Indian economic and social history has so far been carried out in such large and well organized research centers as the National Archives in Delhi, the National Library in Calcutta, and the India Office Library in London. These institutions are justly renowned for their vast collections of manuscripts and books on all aspects of Indian history. So extensive in fact are their holdings that one could easily spend an entire lifetime working happily in any one of them. And their attractiveness is no doubt further enhanced by the convenient location of all these institutions in large metropolitan centers, where students and teachers alike congregate in large numbers.

Estate Management and Estate Records in Oudh

The last several years have seen an outpouring of books on British land policy in India, and on such related questions as tenant right, land sale, and rural indebtedness.’ In almost every case these studies have been built out of the records to be found in the government archives in London, Delhi, and the state capitals. Indeed the direction of research has been determined to a striking extent by the availability of archival material. Those subjects have been explored most thoroughly, such as early settlement policy, for which extensive government records are readily available and conveniently organized. The result has been to introduce a marked bias, not so much British as administrative, into almost all recent work on the history of rural India. Because ofhcial records reHect the concerns and needs of the Government, they are full of information on land

A Concise History of Modern India: Democratic India at the Turn of the Millennium: Prosperity, Poverty, Power

We are a free and sovereign people today and we have rid ourselves of the burden of the past. We look at the world with clear and friendly eyes and at the future with faith and confidence. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, broadcast from New Delhi, 15 August 1947 The hopeful words of any nations founding fathers are likely to be read with some degree of irony decades later. If the words of the founding fathers at times rang hollow, they also, in fact, predicted many successes, not least Indias proud claim to be the worlds largest democracy (Plate 9.1). By the turn of the millennium, more than a dozen general elections and hundreds of state elections had produced a high degree of politicization extending to those long outside the political system. In 1997, at the conclusion of free Indias first half-century, K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005), Dalit by birth, was sworn in as the countrys president, a powerful symbol of the progress and aspirations of ‘untouchables’. The role of president, importantly, had already earlier on three occasions been assumed by a Muslim and, most poignantly, at the time of Indira Gandhis assassination, by a Sikh. The Supreme Courts activism – for example, indicting top government and political leaders for bribery and corruption as well as favouring public-interest litigation – strengthened the effective exercise of civil liberties. Indias press continued to be renowned for its independence and vitality. Economic liberalization had stimulated the growth of a prospering urban middle class and brought about for India a major role in the global software industry. ‘Bollywood’ films and a culture increasingly open to the larger world, together with Indias traditional role as a site of tourism and a producer of the arts, wisdom, and handicrafts, delighted ever-increasing numbers of consumers worldwide. Yet the country continued to be weighed down by seemingly intractable poverty, in the countryside and in urban slums alike. The millennial years were also marked by substantial violence directed against Muslims as well as others, among them Christians, tribals, and Dalits. In 1992, the destruction of the Babri Masjid mosque by Hindu militants was followed by an anti-Muslim pogrom that left at least a thousand people dead; an orchestrated campaign of even greater violence followed a decade later in Gujarat.

Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The British in Bengal: Travers, Robert: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 273 pp., Publication Date: May 2007

In the course of a single generation, the British empire was transformed from being a network of selfgoverning Atlantic communities into a cluster of largely Asian territories acquired, for the most part, through conquest. As countless historians note, the second half of the eighteenth century saw an ‘epochal shift in world power’. For many scholars it was this period which saw the ‘foundations of modern colonial empires’ (p. 2). For some, it marks the beginning of forms of imperial domination which continue into our present.

Revolt, the modern state, and colonized subjects, 1848–1885

The revolt of 1857–8, which swept across much of north India in opposition to British rule, has conventionally been taken as the dividing point that marks the beginning of modern India. Historical periodization is, however, always somewhat arbitrary. With greater distance from the colonial period, when the searing chaos of the uprising was understood either as ‘Mutiny’ to the colonial rulers or as the ‘First War of Independence’ to many nationalists, it is possible to focus on substantial, long-term transformations rather than on a single event. Such an emphasis, moreover, places India in the context of changes taking place in the larger world, not just in terms of events and personalities in India itself. Far from modernity ‘happening’ in Europe and then being transplanted to a country like India, many of these changes took place in relation to each other. Modern technological changes, among them canals, railways, and telegraph, were introduced into India within years of their introduction in Europe. Changes essential to the modern state, including the unification of sovereignty, the surveying and policing of the population, and institutions meant to create an educated citizenry were also, broadly speaking, introduced during the same period in India and in parts of Europe. Indeed, certain modern practices and institutions were either stimulated by the Indian experience or originated in India itself. Municipal cemeteries, as noted above, appeared in India before they did in England; the same is true of English literature as a curricular subject, and of state-sponsored scientific and surveying institutions. The colonial relationship with India was essential, moreover, as Gauri Vishwanathan recently argued, to one of the fundamental characteristics of modern states, namely the practice of state secularism. At the same time, new religious organizations in both India and Britain shared the common pattern of an unprecedented involvement of the laity. In both countries too, the spread of electoral politics was accompanied by debate over the place of religion in public life. Above all, the economic lives of both countries were profoundly, and increasingly, intertwined.