Sujit Sivasundaram

Bio: Sujit Sivasundaram is an academic researcher from University of Cambridge. The author has contributed to research in topics: Empire & Colonialism. The author has an hindex of 11, co-authored 20 publications receiving 353 citations. Previous affiliations of Sujit Sivasundaram include London School of Economics and Political Science.

Sciences and the Global: On Methods, Questions, and Theory

Abstract: This essay explores the mechanics of researching and writing globally oriented histories of science Thinking about how to approach sources is vital, especially given how often historians of science use the excuse of a lack of sources for constraining their projects to European topics The first section suggests a method of cross-contextualization, where scarce and unorthodox sources are read within and alongside more plentiful and traditional ones The next section considers historiography, critiquing the continuing hold of the terms “colonial” and “national” in current work that aspires to be more global The final section considers practice and network theory, asking whether the way we utilize these tools in fact returns us, instinctively, to European and Eurocentric ways of conceiving how science works

Islanded: Britain, Sri Lanka, and the Bounds of an Indian Ocean Colony

Abstract: How did the British come to conquer South Asia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? Answers to this question usually start in northern India, neglecting the dramatic events that marked Britain's contemporaneous subjugation of the island of Sri Lanka. In "Islanded", Sujit Sivasundaram reconsiders the arrival of British rule in South Asia as a dynamic and unfinished process of territorialization and state building, revealing that the British colonial project was framed by the island's traditions and maritime placement and built in part on the model they provided. Using palm-leaf manuscripts from Sri Lanka to read the official colonial archive, Sivasundaram tells the story of two sets of islanders in combat and collaboration. He explores how the British organized the process of "islanding," aiming to create a separable unit of colonial governance and trade in keeping with conceptions of ethnology, culture, and geography. But rather than serving as a radical rupture, he reveals, islanding recycled traditions the British learned from Kandy, a kingdom in the Sri Lankan highlands whose customs - from strategies of war to views of nature - fascinated the British. Picking up a range of unusual themes, from migration, orientalism, and ethnography to botany, medicine, and education, "Islanded" is an engaging retelling of the advent of British rule.

Nature and the Godly Empire: Science and Evangelical Mission in the Pacific, 1795-1850

Abstract: 1. The light of the sun: stimulus for mission 2. The growth of the mind: nature and mission education 3. The seed of the soul: conversion illustrated by nature 4. The body that will bloom: death and its theology of nature 5. The plants of the land: building settlements of civilisation 6. The idol of weeds: the exchange and display of nature.

Trading knowledge: the east india company's elephants in india and britain

Abstract: During the East India Company's rule of India, Britons observed the pervasiveness of elephants in local modes of warfare, hunting, trade, and religious symbolism. The colonizers appropriated this knowledge about elephants: for instance, in the taking-over of Mughal trade routes or Tipu Sultan's stables. What Indians knew about the elephant also fed into a metropolitan culture of anthropomorphism, exemplified in the celebrated shooting of the elephant Chuny in 1826. Anthropomorphic approaches to the elephant held by Britons worked alongside Sanskrit texts and Mughal paintings. These hybrid understandings gave way by the mid-century to an allegedly objective and Christian science of animals, which could not be tainted by what was called pagan superstition. By using the elephant as a point of focus, this article urges the importance of popular traditions of colonial exchange in the emergence of science, and cautions against the reification of indigenous knowledge. The argument aims to show the strengths of a history of knowledge-making that is not focused on elites, the metropolis, or the periphery. A study of the uses of the elephant in colonialism also suggests the multiple and easily interchangeable meanings that animals could carry.

Focus: Global histories of science. Introduction.

Abstract: An interest in global histories of science is not new. Yet the project envisioned by this Focus section is different from that pursued by natural historians and natural philosophers in the early modern age. Instead of tracing universal patterns, there is value in attending to the connections and disconnections of science on the global stage. Instead of assuming the precision of science's boundaries, historians might consider the categories of "science" and "indigenous knowledge" to have emerged from globalization. New global histories of science will be characterized by critical reflection on the limits of generalization, as well as a creative adoption of new sources, methods, and chronologies, in an attempt to decenter the European history of science. Such a project holds the promise of opening up new conversations between historians, anthropologists, philosophers, and sociologists of science. It is of critical importance if the discipline is not to fragment into regional and national subfields or become dominated by structural frameworks such as imperialism.

The Climate of History:Four Theses

Abstract: The science of climate change has important influences on humanist histories of human beings.What scientists have said about climate change challenges not only the ideas about the human that usually sustain the discipline of history but also the analytic strategies that postcolonial and postimperial historians have deployed in the last two decades in response to the postwar scenario of decolonization and globalization.The current construction of historical knowledge presupposes a loss of the old distinction between human and natural histories.The idea of the Anthropocene which considers humans as a geological force severely qualifies humanist histories.This requires us to put histories of capitalism in conversation with the histories of the evolution of earth and human beings.Such conversation between recorded histories and deep histories is one process of exploring the limits of historical understanding.

The Shows of London

Abstract: 'A panoramic history of exhibitions, 1600 - 1862.' Encyclopedic account of every kind of published exhibition in London from the 17th to the 19th centuries. Describes the growth of museums; showmen with strange sights; the eidophusikon; panoramas; dioramas; optical and mechanical shows like the cosmorama, phantasmagoria, magic lantern shows; scientific displays, including the panopticon; wild beast shows; the Great Exhibition; art shows; photography. Fully illustrated in black and white.

The city as text: the politics of landscape interpretation in the kandyan kingdom

Abstract: trate the various and often conflicting goals of local communities trying to regulate the stability of their communities on the basis of aesthetics. Costonis states that \"the values being defended are dictated by neighborhood residents (in intracity squabbles) or by community residents (in intercity squabbles) and are not aligned with a broader public interest but reflect instead the neighborhood or community interests of the residents alone\" (p. 13). However, rather than becoming a dry recitation of facts and circumstances, the cases are light, entertaining, and often hilarious, causing the reader to laugh at what is often too painfully close to home. To illustrate the dichotomies present in aesthetics, Costonis uses another device to make his point: that of \"icons\" and \"aliens.\" These terms alternately represent the positive and the negative images in the built environment that either provide meaning and context in a community or skew the scene in terms of both time and place. In short, going back to his major theme in the book, Costonis states that legal aesthetics is not a case of \"beauty\" or of subjective artistic value, but a case of the cultural value that society as a whole places on objects in our environment--thus Costonis’s heavy reliance on historic preservation images to define the differences between \"icons\" and \"aliens\" and to illustrate the process of defining each within a community. As he states,