India and the British Empire

Douglas Peers is currently Professor of History and Dean of Arts at the University of Waterloo, having previously held positions at York University, the University of Calgary, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He is the author of Between Mars and Mammon: Colonial Armies and the Garrison State in Early-Nineteenth Century India (1995), India Under Colonial Rule, 1700-1885 (2006), and published more than twenty articles and chapters on the intellectual, political, medical, and cultural dimensions of nineteenth-century India in such journals as the Social History of Medicine, Modern Asian Studies, The Historical Journal, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, International History Review, Radical History Review and Journal of World History.Nandini Gooptu is a Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford. She teaches history and politics at the Department of International Development, the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies, and the Department of Politics, University of Oxford. Educated in Calcutta and at Cambridge, and trained as a social historian, she is the author of The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early-Twentieth Century India (2001). While Dr Gooptu's past research has been on colonial India, her current research is concerned with social and political transformation in contemporary India. She has published articles on a variety of subjects, including caste, religion and spiritualism in politics; urban development and politics; poverty, labour, and work.

• 1. Introduction ; 2. State, Power, and Colonialism ; 3. The Indian Economy and the British Empire ; 4. Knowledge Formation in Colonial India ; 5. Colonialism and Social Identities in Flux: Class, Caste, and Religious Community ; 6. Nationalisms in India ; 7. Law, Authority, and Colonial Rule ; 8. Networks of Knowledge: Science and Medicine in Early Colonial India ; 9. Environment and Ecology under British Rule ; 10. Material and Visual Culture of British India ; 11. Literary Modernity in South Asia ; 12. Gendering of Public and Private Selves in Colonial Times ; 13. The Desi Diaspora: Politics, Protest, and Nationalism ; 14. The Political Legacy of Colonialism in South Asia

The fact that many of the contributors to this book are highly regarded, well-established scholars of Britain's occupation of India immediately guarantees the book's importance for other scholars in the field. It does not fail to deliver, because many of the essays provide original arguments thoroughly taking account of the strengths and weaknesses of the past thirty years of historical scholarship ... India and the British Empire therefore makes a valuable contribution to the field of its title by presenting up-to-date assessments of the wide variety of scholarly approaches used to understand the impact of India's period of British occupation on both the occupied and the occupier