The East India Vade-mecum; Or, Complete Guide to Gentlemen Intended for the Civil, Military, Or Naval Service of the Hon. East India Company

The East India Vade-mecum; Or, Complete Guide to Gentlemen Intended for the Civil, Military, Or Naval Service of the Hon. East India Company
Author: Thomas Williamson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 548
Release: 1810
Genre: India
ISBN:

Described sometimes as the first travel guide to India, this is actually an encyclopaedic reference work on every imaginable subject that the new East India Company staff members - civil or military - would wish to know. Subjects, each treated expertly and in some depth, are wide-ranging, covering matters social, economic, religious, mercantile, legal, agricultural and military.

Reading the East India Company 1720-1840

Reading the East India Company 1720-1840
Author: Betty Joseph
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2004-01-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0226412032

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.

Communication and Colonialism in Eastern India

Communication and Colonialism in Eastern India
Author: Nitin Sinha
Publisher: Anthem Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2014-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1783083115

Through a regional focus on Bihar between the 1760s and 1880s, ‘Communication and Colonialism in Eastern India’ reveals the shifting and contradictory nature of the colonial state’s policies and discourses on communication. The volume explores the changing relationship between trade, transport and mobility in India, as evident in the trading and mercantile networks operating at various scales of the economy. Of crucial importance to this study are the ways in which knowledge about roads and routes was collected through practices of travel, tours, surveys, and map-making, all of which benefited the state in its attempts to structure a regime that would regulate ‘undesirable’ forms of mobility.

Colonial Self-Fashioning in British India, c. 1785-1845

Colonial Self-Fashioning in British India, c. 1785-1845
Author: Prasannajit de Silva
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2018-07-26
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1527514285

A stereotypical view of the nineteenth-century British in India, which might be characterised as one of deliberate isolation and segregation from their surroundings, has recently been complemented by one evoking a high degree of integration and closer co-existence in the eighteenth century. Focusing on a period which straddles this apparent shift, this book explores a variety of ways in which British residents in India represented their lives through visual material, and reveals a more nuanced position. Consideration of these images, which have often been overlooked in the scholarly literature, opens up questions of identity facing the British population in India at this time and facing colonial societies more generally, and issues about the role of visual culture in negotiating them. It also underlines the fragile and contested nature of identity: the colonists’ self-fashioning encompassed not only expressions of difference from their Indian setting, but also what distinguished them from their compatriots back in Britain, as well as engaging with metropolitan attitudes towards, and prejudices about, them.