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Author

David Washbrook

Other affiliations: University of Warwick
Bio: David Washbrook is an academic researcher from St Antony's College. The author has contributed to research in topics: Politics & Institution. The author has an hindex of 12, co-authored 20 publications receiving 1057 citations. Previous affiliations of David Washbrook include University of Warwick.

Papers
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The law may be seen as a set of general principles through which political authority and the state (however constituted) attempt to legitimize the social institutions and norms of conduct which they find valuable.
Abstract: Perhaps the most intransigent problem in the recent history of Indian society remains an adequate understanding of the processes of social change which took place under colonialism. As the continunig controversies within, as much as between, the traditions of modernization theory, Marxism, and the underdevelopment theory make plain, the Indian historical record is peculiarly difficult to grasp with conventional sociological concepts. In the study of Western European society, a focus on the evolution of legal ideas and institutions has proved a useful entry point to social history.The law may be seen to represent a set of general principles through which political authority and the state (however constituted) attempt to legitimize the social institutions and norms of conduct which they find valuable. As such, its history reflects the struggle in society to assume, control or resist this authority. Its study should help to reveal the nature of the forces involved in the struggle and to suggest the implications for social development of the way in which, at any one time, their struggle was resolved. The condition of the law may be seen to crystallize the condition of society. This, of course, could be said of any governing institution. But where the law becomes uniquely valuable is in that, because of its social function, the struggle around it is necessarily expressed in terms of general statements of principle rather than particular statements of private and discrete interest. At the most fundamental level, these principles demarcate the rules on which the contending parties seek to build their versions of society and provide useful clues to their wider, often undisclosed, positions.

265 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The post-Orientalist history of the Third World has become a paradigm for a new generation of historians and anthropologists as mentioned in this paper, and these directions have been most recently and sharply endorsed in Gyan Prakash's discussion, ‘Writing post-orientalist histories of the third world: Perspectives from Indian Historiography.
Abstract: Over the last decade, studies of ‘third world’ histories and cultures have come to draw to a very considerable extent upon the theoretical perspectives provided by poststructuralism and postmodernism. With the publication in 1978 of Edward Said's work, Orientalism, these perspectives—now fused and extended into a distinctive amalgam of cultural critique, Foucauldian approaches to power, engaged ‘politics of difference,’ and postmodernist emphases on the decentered and the heterogeneous—began to be appropriated in a major way for the study of non-European histories and cultures. Certainly in our own field of Indian colonial history, Said's characteristic blending of these themes has now become virtually a paradigm for a new generation of historians and anthropologists. These directions have been most recently and sharply endorsed in Gyan Prakash's discussion, ‘Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography.’

236 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In the last five years, monographys on South Asia related historical subjects have been published by presses in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, France, the Soviet Union and Japan as well as, of course, India and Pakistan, the rest of the Commonwealth and the United States as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Over the last fifteen to twenty years, interest in the history of early modern and modern South Asia has grown enormously and has engaged the attention of an increasingly international audience. Whereas, at the end of the 1960s, research in the subject was largely confined to universities in South Asia itself and the rest of the British Commonwealth, today a variety of projects, conferences and regular workshops link together scholars from South Asia and the Commonwealth with those in Japan, Indonesia, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Italy, Eastern Europe and the United States. Equally, whereas twenty years ago the publication of South Asia-related research was restricted to a few specialist journals, today this research provides the staple of at least four quarterlies with major international circulations and appears regularly in most of the leading historical periodicals. In the last five years, monographys on South Asia related historical subjects have been published by presses in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, France, the Soviet Union and Japan as well as, of course, India and Pakistan, the rest of the Commonwealth and the United States.

123 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The challenge of Immanuel Wallerstein to reconceive the history of South Asia since 1750 as part of the development of a capitalist world system has yet to elicit an adequate response from South Asia's historians as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The challenge of Immanuel Wallerstein—to reconceive the history of South Asia since 1750 as part of the development of a capitalist world system—has yet to elicit an adequate response from South Asia's historians. While a few social scientists interested in the past have sought to apply his model, the majority of historians have either gone no further than to acknowledge the importance of bilateral relations with imperial Britain in the construction of modern South Asian society, or else—it would seem increasingly—have retreated behind the walls of the “indigenous,” the “local,” the “particular,” and, at times, the just plain “peculiar” in their interpretations of South Asia's modern experience. But few historians of imperial Britain see it as a completely freestanding and self-determining entity, able to direct its relationships with India or elsewhere in a manner unconstrained by developments in other areas of the world. And on closer examination, many of the most quintessentially South Asian institutions and structures, including a large number of those that twentieth century modernization theorists please to call “traditional,” can be seen to have been shaped by global forces.

85 citations

Book
29 Jul 1976
TL;DR: The first three-quarters of a century of British rule, down to the 1870s, had effectively torn apart and fragmented the political institutions of the South, and had left a highly parochial political society in which loyalties seldom extended beyond face-to-face relationships and power was extremely localized as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: This book examines an important period of transition in the political structure of South India. The first three-quarters of a century of British rule, down to the 1870s, had effectively torn apart and fragmented the political institutions of the South, and had left a highly parochial political society in which loyalties seldom extended beyond face-to-face relationships and power was extremely localized. This lack of significant supra-local political connections contributed to the Madras Presidency's reputation as the most 'benighted' of all Indian provinces.

79 citations


Cited by
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The purpose is to show how transnational and transimperial approaches are vital to understanding some of the key issues with which historians of health, disease, and medicine are concerned and to show what can be gained from taking a broader perspective.
Abstract: The emergence of global history has been one of the more notable features of academic history over the past three decades. Although historians of disease were among the pioneers of one of its earlier incarnations—world history—the recent “global turn” has made relatively little impact on histories of health, disease, and medicine. Most continue to be framed by familiar entities such as the colony or nation-state or are confined to particular medical “traditions.” This article aims to show what can be gained from taking a broader perspective. Its purpose is not to replace other ways of seeing or to write a new “grand narrative” but to show how transnational and transimperial approaches are vital to understanding some of the key issues with which historians of health, disease, and medicine are concerned. Moving on from an analysis of earlier periods of integration, the article offers some reflections on our own era of globalization and on the emerging field of global health.

1,334 citations

Book
06 Apr 2005
TL;DR: The Politics of Nature and the Making of Environmental Subjects as discussed by the authors is a series of articles about the creation of forests and the role of government in the creation and management of forests. But it is not a comprehensive survey of the field.
Abstract: About the Series ix Preface and Acknowledgments xi 1. Introduction: The Politics of Nature and the Making of Environmental Subjects 1 Part I: Power/Knowledge and the Creation of Forests 25 2. Forests of Statistics: Colonial Environmental Knowledges 32 3. Struggles over Kumaon's Forests, 1815-1916 65 Part II: A New Technology of Environmental Government: Politics, Institutions, and Subjectivities 87 4. Governmentalized Localities: The Dispersal of Regulation 101 5. Inside the Regulatory Community 127 6. Making Environmental Subjects: Intimate Government 164 7. Conclusion: The Analytics of Environmentality 201 Notes 231 Bibliography 279 Index 309

1,201 citations

Book
01 Jan 1997
TL;DR: A Dominance without Hegemony and its Historiographies Containment of Historiography in a Dominant Culture Where Does Historical Criticism Come From? The Universalizing Tendency of Capital and its Limitations The General Configuration of Power in Colonial India II. Paradoxes of Power Idioms of Dominance and Subordination Order and Danda Improvement and Dharma Obedience and Bhakti Rightful Dissent and Dharmic Protest III. Conclusion as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Preface Note on Transliteration PART 1: Colonialism in South Asia: A Dominance without Hegemony and Its Historiography I. Conditions for a Critique of Historiography Dominance and Its Historiographies Containment of Historiography in a Dominant Culture Where Does Historical Criticism Come From? The Universalizing Tendency of Capital and Its Limitations The General Configuration of Power in Colonial India II. Paradoxes of Power Idioms of Dominance and Subordination Order and Danda Improvement and Dharma Obedience and Bhakti Rightful Dissent and Dharmic Protest III. Dominance without Hegemony: The Colonialist Moment Overdeterminations Colonialism as the Failure of a Universalist Project The Fabrication of a Spurious Hegemony The Bad Faith of Historiography IV. Preamble to an Autocritique PART 2: Discipline and Mobilize: Hegemony and Elite Control in Nationalist Campaigns I. Mobilization and Hegemony Anticipation of Power by Mobilization A Fight for Prestige II. Swadeshi Mobilization Poor Nikhilesh Caste Sanctions Social Boycott Liberal Politics, Traditional Bans Swadeshi by Coercion or Consent? III. Mobilization For Non-cooperation Social Boycott in Non-cooperation Gandhi's Opposition to Social Boycott Hegemonic Claims Contested IV. Gandhian Discipline Discipline versus Persuasion Two Disciplines- Elite and Subaltern Crowd Control and Soul Control V. Conclusion PART 3: An Indian Historiography of India: Hegemonic Implications of a Nineteenth-Century Agenda I. Calling on Indians to Write Their Own History II. Historiography and the Formation of a Colonial State Early Colonial Historiography Three Types of Narratives Education as an Instrument of Colonialism The Importance of English III. Colonialism and the Languages of the Colonized Indigenous Languages Harnessed to the Raj Novels and Histories Beginnings of an Indigenous Rationalist Historiography An Ideology of Matribhasha IV. Historiography and the Question of Power An Appropriated Past The Theme of Kalamka Bahubol and Its Objects V. A Failed Agenda Notes Glossary Index

538 citations