Explores the politics of theatrical and social performance in the establishment of eighteenth-century British imperial rule.

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.

By the nineteenth century the British had ruled India for over a hundred years, and had consolidated their power over the sub-continent. Until 1858, when Queen Victoria assumed sovereignty following the Indian Rebellion, the country was run by the East India Company - by this time a hybrid of state and commercial enterprises and eloquently and fiercely attacked as intrinsically immoral and dangerous by Edmund Burke in the late 1700s. Seeking to go beyond the statutes and ceremony, and show the reality of the interactions between rulers and ruled on a local level, this book looks at one of the most interesting phenomena of British India - the 'Eurasians'. The adventurers of the early years of Indian occupation arrived alone, and in taking 'native' mistresses and wives, created a race of administrators who were 'others' to both the native population and the British ruling class. These Anglo-Indian people existed in the zone between the colonizer and the colonized, and their history provides a wonderfully rich source for understanding Indian social history, race and colonial hegemony.

This book analyses the status of women in Bengal, India, by examining the versatile everyday living conditions of women, and how they are represented as individuals and as a category in the media. Contributors to the book start their discussion from the point that women in India have a varied experience of living, thinking, and acting specific to the regional cultural context. Caste ideology specified privileges and sanctions according to innate attributes, differ by sex as well as ethnicity, class, caste, minority status, and marginal position intersect lives and render unique life experiences. With a focus on women and their lived experiences, performances by them and performances imitating women’s roles, the book offers a complex and rich analysis of the reality of women’s lives based on research and reflections by 25 scholars. Organised into two sections, the book presents women in reality, their living conditions, struggles, and women as represented in films, stories, framed in plots sometimes by women and sometimes by men. The chapters provide insights on how institutionalised gender distinctions create subordination and marginality of women and their struggles to survive in a society dominated by heteropatriarchal ideology and its practice. This book improves our understanding of various dimensions of gender and transgender relations in India. It will be of interest to researchers in Gender Studies, South Asian Culture and Society, and Studies on India.

In this broad study of British rule in India during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Sudipta Sen takes up this dual agenda, sketching out the interrelationships between nationalism, imperialism, and identity formation as they played out in both England and South Asia.

This volume covers the evolution of the chartered company; contributions employ comparative methods, archival research, case studies, statistical analyses, computational models, network analyses, and new theoretical conceptualizations to map out the complex interactions that took place between state and commercial actors across the globe.

This book assesses British colonialism in South Asia in a transnational light, with the Indian Ocean region as its ambit, and with a focus on ‘subaltern’ groups and actors. It breaks new ground by combining new strands of research on colonial history. Thinking about colonialism in dynamic terms, the book focuses on the movement of people of the lower orders that imperial ventures generated. Challenging the assumed stability of colonial rule, the social spaces featured are those that threatened the racial, class and moral order instituted by British colonial states. By elaborating on the colonial state's strategies to control perceived 'disorder' and the modes of resistance and subversion that subaltern subjects used to challenge state control, a picture of British Empire as an ultimately precarious, shifting and unruly formation is presented, which is quite distinct from its self-projected image as an orderly entity. Thoroughly researched and innovative in its approach, this book will be a valuable resource for scholars of Asian, British imperial/colonial, transnational and international history.

This book seeks to frame the “the idea of India” in the American imaginary within a transnational lens that is attentive to global flows of goods, people, and ideas within the circuits of imperial and maritime economies in nineteenth century America (roughly 1780s-1880s). This diverse and interdisciplinary volume – with essays by upcoming as well as established scholars – aims to add to an understanding of the fast changing terrain of economic, political, and cultural life in the US as it emerged from being a British colony to having imperial ambitions of its own on the global stage. The essays trace, variously, the evolution of the changing self-image of a nation embodying a surprisingly cosmopolitan sensibility, open to different cultural values and customs in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century to one that slowly adopted rigid and discriminatory racial and cultural attitudes spawned by the widespread missionary activities of the ABCFM and the fierce economic pulls and pushes of American mercantilism by the end of the nineteenth century. The different uses of India become a way of refining an American national identity.