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.

'Archiving the British Raj' analyses the institutional history of modern archival policy in India. It tells us the history of the colonial archive itself through the debates and discussions about its nature, use, and functioning that took place first amongst British officials and scholars and, nearer independence, amongst Indian historians. This account counters an understanding of the archive as a mere repository of documents, and instead lays bare its complex relationship with the colonial state.

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.

This book examines how and why British imperial rule shaped scientific knowledge about malaria and its cures in nineteenth-century India. This title is also available as Open Access.

British histories in the nineteenth century were by and large monologues. From the turn of the century Indians began to 'talk back', questioning colonial assumptions and narratives of India's past. What was the point of this endeavour? What was said when the Indians began to talk back? What was the discourse of civilization all about? Sabyasachi Bhattacharya explores these questions and lays bare the various forms this rhetoric took: from the defence of Indian civilization to a tendency towards vainglorious depiction of 'Hindu civilization'; from asserting civilizational unity in the distant past to creating a surrogate for nationhood. Tracing the inception of this discourse in the works of R.G. Bhandarkar and Bankimchandra Chatterjee, this book explores the evolution of the idea of civilization in the writings of luminaries like Gandhi, Tagore, Vivekananda, and Nehru, as well as works of intellectuals, historians, linguists, and sociologists like M.G. Ranade, V.K. Rajwade, D.D. Kosambi, Sardar K.M. Panikkar, Nirmal Kumar Bose, and many present-day scholars.

A provocative examination of how the British colonial experience in India was shaped by chronic unease, anxiety, and insecurity.

Presenting a communicational perspective on the British empire in India during the 20th century, the book seeks to examine how, and explain why, British proconsuls, civil servants and even the monarch George V, as well as Indian nationalists, interacted with the media, primarily British and American, and with what consequences.

2017 Bentley Book Prize, World History Association Linking four continents over three centuries, Selling Empire demonstrates the centrality of India--both as an idea and a place--to the making of a global British imperial system. In the seventeenth century, Britain was economically, politically, and militarily weaker than India, but Britons increasingly made use of India's strengths to build their own empire in both America and Asia. Early English colonial promoters first envisioned America as a potential India, hoping that the nascent Atlantic colonies could produce Asian raw materials. When this vision failed to materialize, Britain's circulation of Indian manufactured goods--from umbrellas to cottons--to Africa, Europe, and America then established an empire of goods and the supposed good of empire. Eacott recasts the British empire's chronology and geography by situating the development of consumer culture, the American Revolution, and British industrialization in the commercial intersections linking the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. From the seventeenth into the nineteenth century and beyond, the evolving networks, ideas, and fashions that bound India, Britain, and America shaped persisting global structures of economic and cultural interdependence.

Presents An Excellent Introduction To The Rise And Fall Of The British Raj, Accurate, Succinct And Engaging. The Account Is Full Of Anecdotes And That Capture The Spirit Of Time. Based An Extensive Research. Hudicious, Vigorous And Highly Readable. 10 Chapters And A Number Of Black And White Photographs.