The Company-State offers a political and intellectual history of the English East India Company in the century before its acquisition of territorial power. It argues the Company was no mere merchant, but a form of early modern, colonial state and sovereign that laid the foundations for the British Empire in India.

Archives intersect with our lives in many ways. We have archives of our own, documenting family memories and histories. Then, there are larger archives that document different aspects of the past — memories, identities, location, time, and space. This volume explores changing notions of the archive in different areas, to trace the ways in which the archives continue to be used in history. It examines how history, the historian, and the archive interact in many ways to look at the past and record it. The chapters in this volume discuss an array of diverse and important themes regarding the making and usage of archives which include reconstructing pre-modern economic history from the Dutch archives; the role of India Office Records in the British Library; reading the Rungia Gosavi Affair in 1857 from colonial archives; and Uday Shankar’s Kalpana as archive besides the usage of archives to study nationalism, historiography and literature, water and Chola history, Mysorean invasions in Kerala, and cyberspace. The chapters also explore how archives impact and shape our investigations. First of its kind, this important work will be of interest to scholars and researchers of archival studies, research methodology, archaeology, Indian history, ancient history, medieval history, modern India, anthropology, and history in general.

Since it was first published in 1982 British Archives has established itself as the premier reference work to holdings of archives and manuscript collections throughout the UK. The 3rd edition has been extensively revised and enlarged with more than 150 new entries, further widening the range of the book. Entries are structured to show the archives of the organisation as distinct from deposited collections and significant non-manuscript material, and additional details of fax number and conservation provision are included for the first time. All the existing entries have been significantly updated, together with the select bibliography and list of useful addresses of various organisations involved in the care and custody of archives. The introduction provides an invaluable guide to researchers using archives, including a summary of the relevant legislation and a detailed description of the usual holdings of county and other local authority record offices.

This guide covers the period from the Restoration of Charles II to the establishment of the Ministry of Defence in 1964. It includes the records of the Board of Ordnance, military intelligence and military aviation.

This handbook provides an indispensable reference guide to most aspects of the history of India’s railways. The secondary literature is surveyed, primary sources identified, statistical and cartographic data discussed, and a massive bibliography made available.

In Reading the East India Company, Betty Joseph offers an innovative account of how archives—and the practice of archiving—shaped colonial ideologies in Britain and British-controlled India during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Drawing on the British East India Company's records as well as novels, memoirs, portraiture and guidebooks, Joseph shows how the company's economic and archival practices intersected to produce colonial "fictions" or "truth-effects" that strictly governed class and gender roles—in effect creating a "grammar of power" that kept the far-flung empire intact. And while women were often excluded from this archive, Joseph finds that we can still hear their voices at certain key historical junctures. Attending to these voices, Joseph illustrates how the writing of history belongs not only to the colonial project set forth by British men, but also to the agendas and mechanisms of agency—of colonized Indian, as well as European women. In the process, she makes a valuable and lasting contribution to gender studies, postcolonial theory, and the history of South Asia.