scholarly journals British Humanitarian Political Economy and Famine in India, 1838–1842

2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-244
Author(s):  
Andrea Major
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
South Asia ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Central India ◽  
East India Company ◽  
British India ◽  
North Central ◽  
Commodity Production ◽  
Company Governance ◽  
The Impact

AbstractThis article explores the nature and limitations of humanitarian political economy by discussing metropolitan British responses to a major famine that took place in the Agra region of north-central India in 1837–38. This disaster played a significant role in catalyzing wider debates about the impact of East India Company governance and the place of the subcontinent within the post-emancipation British Empire. By comparing the responses of organization such as the Aborigines Protection Society and British India Society to that of proponents of the newly emergent indenture system, the paper seeks to contextualize responses to the famine in terms both of longer histories of famine in South Asia and of the specific imperial circumstances of the late 1830s. In doing so, it explores how ideas of agricultural distress in India fed into competing strategies to utilize Indian labor in the service of colonial commodity production both within India and around the empire.

scholarly journals TRANSFORMATIONS OF BYRON IN THE LITERATURE OF BRITISH INDIA

2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 573-593
Author(s):  
Máire ní Fhlathúin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
East India Company ◽  
British India ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Impact

This essay examines the receptionof Byron's work, and some responses to it, among the poets of the British community in India during the first half of the nineteenth century. The first section sketches some of the routes by which Byron's work and accounts of his life were circulated and read in India and demonstrates the impact of his work on the poets of British India. These poets co-opted Byronic texts into their own writings in the form of epigraphs and other citations and allusions, composed responses to Byron and his work, and imitated the tropes, formats and themes of Byron's poetry. The second section of the essay looks in more detail at selected examples of the many adaptations and imitations of Byron's work that proliferated during this period. In these poems, Byronic models are appropriated by writers whose chosen professions or relationships have the effect of aligning them with the colonial project of the East India Company. They re-imagined the encounter with the romanticized Orient that characterizes many of Byron's works in response to the specific political and cultural contexts of British India in the nineteenth century.

The Indian Princely States and Their Rulers

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angma D. Jhala
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
British Empire ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Heritage Tourism ◽  
British India ◽  
South Asian History ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Company Directors ◽  
Asian History ◽  
Trade Education

Colonial South Asian history has focused on British India and the nationalists who later resisted and supplanted it. However, long before India’s independence from Britain, there were regions where neither the British nor the nationalists were primarily positioned. These were the approximately six hundred semi-autonomous kingdoms, or “princely states” (often referred to as “Indian India”), which spanned the breadth and length of the subcontinent. They comprised two-fifths of the landmass and one-third of the population, excluding Burma. Though their rulers were long marginalized in modern South Asian and imperial history as antiquated relics of the medieval era, oriental despots, or puppet princes, they were real forces in the governing of the subcontinent, not only during the precolonial era but also at the heyday of the British Empire and continue to play a part in modern South Asia. Native rulers introduced new systems of administration, taxation, law, religious and social reform, trade, education, public health, and technology, including railways, ginning factories, and telegraphs, to their states; served as patrons of architecture, the arts, culinary innovation, and sport; encouraged the introduction of representative forms of government; and, in certain cases, supported popular anticolonial movements. In some principalities, where ruling families practiced different faiths from the majority of their citizens, their policies would influence the political trajectories of their erstwhile states long after the end of colonialism. With India’s independence and Partition in 1947, the princely states merged with the new nations of South Asia, and in the 1970s former princes lost their economic entitlement of the Privy Purse. However, they continued to play a part in postcolonial South Asia, serving as diplomats, governors, patrons of educational and charitable institutions, local magnates, company directors, cabinet ministers and, perhaps most prominently, as elected politicians and leaders of heritage tourism.

scholarly journals Convicts, Commodities, and Connections in British Asia and the Indian Ocean, 1789–1866

2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (S27) ◽  
pp. 205-227
Author(s):  
Clare Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Bay Of Bengal ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Port Cities ◽  
Company Governance ◽  
Convict Transportation ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThis article explores the transportation of Indian convicts to the port cities of the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean during the period 1789 to 1866. It considers the relationship between East India Company transportation and earlier and concurrent British Crown transportation to the Americas and Australia. It is concerned in particular with the interconnection between convictism and enslavement in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. Examining the roots of transportation in South Asia in the repressive policies of the East India Company, especially in relation to its occupation of land and expropriation of resources, it moves on to discuss aspects of convicts’ lives in Moulmein, Singapore, Mauritius, and Aden. This includes their labour regime and their relationship to other workers. It argues that Indian convict transportation was part of a carceral circuit of repression and coerced labour extraction that was intertwined with the expansion of East India Company governance and trade. The Company used transportation as a means of removing resistant subjects from their homes, and of supplying an unfree labour force to develop commodity exports and to build the infrastructure necessary for the establishment, population, and connection of littoral nodes. However, the close confinement and association of convicts during transportation rendered the punishment a vector for the development of transregional political solidarities, centred in and around the Company's port cities.

British India as a Problem in Political Economy: Comparing James Steuart and Adam Smith

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Travers
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
The Political ◽  
British India ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
Imperial Politics ◽  
Indian Affairs ◽  
Distinct Branch ◽  
Conceptual Resources

The consolidation of political economy as a distinct branch of the science of politics was simultaneous with the expansion and diversification of the overseas British Empire. This new political economy was often regarded as distant from the enterprise of imperial expansion. Political economists criticized the mercantile system of restricted colonial trades and monopoly corporations. This chapter discusses the political economy in relation to the imperial politics in India. It takes into focus the problems of imperial politics in India, the first of which was that the East India Company’s growing empire barely fitted into the notions of a British ‘empire of liberty’ which was perceived to be ‘commercial, Protestant, maritime, and free’; and the second was the British ignorance of and lack of sympathy for local customs and manners. In the chapter, the British theorists James Steuart and Adam Smith are closely examined. Both addressed the emerging empire of British India as a dilemma in political economy. Their thinking on Indian affairs posed challenges to the Company rule in India, but at the same time offered theoretical and conceptual resources for the unpopular Company government.

The Political Economy of Opium Smuggling in Early Nineteenth Century India: Leakage or Resistance?

2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
CLAUDE MARKOVITS
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Central India ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
The Political ◽  
Western India ◽  
Trading System

AbstractThis article looks at the political economy of opium smuggling in India in the first decades of the nineteenth century, in particular in relation to Sindh, one of the last independent polities in the subcontinent. After a description of the smuggling of ‘Malwa’ opium (grown in the princely states of Central India) into China—in defiance of the monopoly of the East India Company over ‘Bengal’ or ‘Patna’ opium, grown in Bihar—it considers the role of Indian merchants and capitalists in its emergence and development, and critiques the argument put forward in a recent book by Amar Farooqi that it represented both a form of ‘subversion’ and that it contributed decisively to capital accumulation in Western India. This article concludes by analysing the role of the opium trade in integrating Sindh into the British imperial trading system, arguing that it was more effective in boosting Empire than in nurturing indigenous capitalism in India.

“Commodity Sui Generis”

2019 ◽  
Vol 51 (S1) ◽  
pp. 75-99
Author(s):  
Oleg Ananyin ◽  
Denis Melnik
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Theoretical Issue ◽  
The Political ◽  
Socialist Economy ◽  
Economic Discourse ◽  
Commodity Production ◽  
Stable Core ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Different Levels

The article traces trends in Soviet economic discourse from the 1920s until perestroika. We examine the works of leading political economists of this period through the lens of debates on market exchanges under socialism—the central theoretical issue of the political economy of socialism. The discursive structure underlying the debates can be traced back to the writing of the first Soviet textbook on political economy, personally supervised by Joseph Stalin. Our purpose is to assess the impact of this textbook on subsequent discussions of the role of commodity production and market exchanges in a socialist economy. The story suggests that Soviet economic discourse was neither homogeneous nor stable. Rather, it consisted of several subdiscourses of different levels of authoritativeness allowing for a certain stable core as an attribute of any authoritative discourse, as well as for more flexible elements that adjusted the structure to new political and ideological challenges.

scholarly journals The Andaman Islands Penal Colony: Race, Class, Criminality, and the British Empire

2018 ◽  
Vol 63 (S26) ◽  
pp. 25-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clare Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Social Outcomes ◽  
Andaman Islands ◽  
British India ◽  
Penal Colony ◽  
Political Dominance ◽  
Forced Resettlement ◽  
Social Discipline

ABSTRACTThis article explores the British Empire’s configuration of imprisonment and transportation in the Andaman Islands penal colony. It shows that British governance in the Islands produced new modes of carcerality and coerced migration in which the relocation of convicts, prisoners, and criminal tribes underpinned imperial attempts at political dominance and economic development. The article focuses on the penal transportation of Eurasian convicts, the employment of free Eurasians and Anglo-Indians as convict overseers and administrators, the migration of “volunteer” Indian prisoners from the mainland, the free settlement of Anglo-Indians, and the forced resettlement of the Bhantu “criminal tribe”. It examines the issue from the periphery of British India, thus showing that class, race, and criminality combined to produce penal and social outcomes that were different from those of the imperial mainland. These were related to ideologies of imperial governmentality, including social discipline and penal practice, and the exigencies of political economy.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
James M. Vaughn
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Early Development ◽  
Alternative Interpretation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
British India

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book provides an alternative interpretation of the origins and early development of British India and the Second British Empire. It fundamentally reconceives the process by which British actors on the ground in South Asia laid the basis for a territorial empire that eventually spanned the subcontinent. The main argument is that the East India Company's imperial metamorphosis, and the origins of British India and the Second Empire, were rooted in the political defeat of radical liberalism. The transition to the Second Empire was a result of the victory won by metropolitan conservative-reactionary forces over their radical political opponents.

The Queen’s Daughters: White Prostitutes, British India and the Contagious Diseases Acts

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-10
Author(s):  
Sagaree Jain
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
British Empire ◽  
White Women ◽  
British India ◽  
Sexual Slavery ◽  
Indian Women ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Contagious Diseases ◽  
Many Sources ◽  
The Ideal

Within the larger subject of the regulation of prostitution under the British Empire in South Asia, this article examines the figure of the White Prostitute in brothels and lock hospitals in colonial India. The White Prostitute in colonial India was in every way segregated from her native counterparts: in medicine, in physical quarters and in popular conceptions of her mobility, agency and rationality. Despite their mistreatment and vulnerability in many sources, white prostitutes were understood as closer to the ideal of regulable, liberal subjecthood compared to Indian women working in the same conditions and ultimately demonstrated the dynamism of the conditions of prostitution in this time and place. Through examination of literature, advocacy and military records, this article contends that the figure of the White Prostitute fractured concepts of caste-based prostitution in India and was wielded by imperial feminists to attack British regulation of prostitution and sexual slavery in India for brown as well as white women.

The East India Company’s Conquest of Assam, India, and “Community” Justice: Panchayats/Mels in Translation

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 357-377
Author(s):  
Amrita SHODHAN
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Dispute Resolution ◽  
Central India ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Court System ◽  
Eastern India ◽  
Community Justice ◽  
Revenue Administration ◽  
British Court

AbstractThe East India Company troops fighting the Burmese aggression on the frontier of Bengal in Eastern India “freed” upper and lower Assam territories in 1825. David Scott of the Bengal Service was appointed to oversee the establishment of civil and revenue administration in these frontier territories. He established a hierarchical multiple structure of “native courts”—called panchayats—as the chief medium of civil and criminal justice. This was ostensibly continuing a traditional Assamese form of dispute resolution—the mel; however, the British criminal jury as well as the expert assessor model animated the system. After his death in 1831, the system was brought in line with the rest of the Bengal administration based on the British court system. His experiment, paralleled in many other newly conquered and ceded districts from the Madras territories to Central India, suggests the use of this mode in post-conquest situations by British administrators in South Asia.

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