Showing papers in "Indian Economic and Social History Review in 1994"

The 'discovery' of malnutrition and diet in colonial India:

Abstract: Acknowledgements: An earlier version of this paper was presented at the University of Pennsylvania and the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London in September-October 1992. I am grateful to all those who commented on the early draft, especially David Ludden, Pramit Chaudhari, Sanjay Sharma and Indira Chowdhury Sengupta. In the last few decades it has come to be recognised that malnutrition constitutes India’s ’major health problem’, both directly, through diseases caused by dietary deficiencies, and indirectly, by increased susceptibility to infections of various kinds.’ But looking at the recent literature for South Asia one might rapidly form the impression that the investigation of malnutrition is a recent development and has only lately developed any technical expertise and scientific standing. Works published before 1970

Imperial agendas and India's forests: The early history of Indian forestry, 1800-1878

Abstract: extent to which the colonial era was a major ecological watershed. Further, the influence of particular interests or specific ideological preferences on policy choices requires rigorous analysis. The central premise of imperial forester historians was that the imperial phase was a watershed. Ribbentrop argued that scientific forestry under imperial aegis marked the end of a ’war on the forests’.’ Stebbing contended that rapacious private interests had been brought under scientific supervision and control.2 For the imperial forester historians, a peace with nature

Political intermediaries in Kakatiya Andhra, 1175-1325:

Abstract: south Indian state is fuelled largely by varying interpretations of the intermediary levels of socio-political organisation. It is now widely conceded that strong local associations such as the nattar peasant assembly flourished in the wet zone of the Tamil country until the mid-Vijayanagara period. Elsewhere in south India, the situation was strikingly different. In the dryer expanses of Tamil Nadu and in most of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, where the bulk of the terrain is upland plateau, political authority was exercised by individuals who occupied an intermediate position between the king at the top of the hierarchy and the villagers at the bottom. Were such men the bureaucratic agents of a centralised administration, the vassal lords in a feudal structure or chiefs who represented communal groups such as tribes or castes?’ Because of disagreements over the nature of state structure, we lack even a common terminology to use in referring to these

The trans-Karakoram trade in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

Abstract: Among the paradoxes of the modern world is the way in which change, development and technological progress have rendered the mountain barriers between different regions not less but more formidable than th6y were before. Ancient routes, crossing savage ranges by high and often glaciated passes, could be negotiated by the feet of traders and pilgrims and their pack-animals; but it is only those whose gradient is gentle enough for the road and rail systems on which modern overland communications depend that remain in use today. On many another the ibex and the marmot now roam undisturbed.

Imperialism, ecology and disease: Cholera in India, 1850-1950

Abstract: scholarly insights, and David Arnold particularly has contributed to our understanding of ’cholera and colonialism’.’ Arnold was concerned primarily about ’political’ implications and cultural interplay, however, and epidemiological, environmental and economic questions about cholera’s high tide and recession during British rule remain. Cholera was pronounced and apparently proliferating in the last half of the nineteenth century, but began to decline notably after World War I. According to the formidable Robert Koch and contemporary authorities in the Indian Medical Service, after the mid-nineteenth century it spread its lethal grasp into locales previously not heavily or perpetually afflicted, notably Punjab and central India, and intensified in an old haunt, Bengal Cholera was notoriously Indian, a more distinctive export than the subcontinent’s indigo, jute and tea, and by Independence the nations emergent from British India experienced 99 per cent of global fatalities. Cholera cannot be confused with a Western disease and its mortality cannot be attributed to increased contact

From alienation to integration: Changes in the politics of caste in Bengal, 1937-47

Abstract: more significant, after 1937 some other major developments took place, and these completely changed the complexion of the movement. During the last decade of colonial rule, as transfer of power became a distinct possibility and new political alignments were to be effected, the importance of the scheduled castes, representing a sizeable proportion of the non-Muslim population in Bengali with 30 reserved seats in the provincial legislature,

West Africa and the Pondicherry textile industry

Abstract: which originally appeared as ’Guinée Cloth: Linked Transformations within France’s Empire in the Nineteenth Century’, 128, xxxii, 4, 1992, pp. 597-627 and Morris D. Morris for his encouragement to revise my research for an Indianist audience. A simple piece of indigo-dyed cloth linked France’s mainland Indian colony of Pondicherry to France’s West African coastal colony of Senegal, Senegal to the French Caribbean islands and all three to France itself.

The western Indian Ocean and the early maritime links of the Indian subcontinent

Abstract: evolve out of the earlier Greek historiographical tradition which incorporated notices on India from around the fifth century B.C. onwards? If the Periplus Maris Erythraei grew out of an earlier literary tradition, it would be quite legitimate to argue that it reflects expanding Graeco-Roman interests in the western Indian Ocean. On the contrary, if it stands out as an isolated example of Greek writing, it should be possible to conclude that it represents attempts at the codification of local seafaring traditions and knowledge in the western Indian Ocean. Any study of early maritime links with the Mediterranean would then necessarily have to contend with the indigenous Indian and Arab sailing traditions now available to us largely from ethnographic studies and accounts. It is significant that the Eruthras thalassa which roughly corresponds to the present Indian Ocean appears in Greek writing only in the first century A.D.’ Pliny was the first classical author to use the term Eruthras thalassa

Reordering the earth: The emergence of geology as a scientific discipline in colonial India:

Abstract: was only a cover maintained by the colonials to ’guard against the bracing winds of theoretical science’. The model, first chalked out by Donald Fleming in 1962 for studying American and Australian experiences with ’colonial’ science was subsequently universalised with minor variations by George Basalla (1967) and Roy MacLeod (1982).’ In recent years a major chunk of Western historiography on this theme has evolved in the shadow of these notions without taking much note of the basic difference between the settler colonies in the temperate environs and the non-settler colonies like India in the tropics. The second school professing to study ’colonial science’ from below, reports from the viewpoint of the periphery. The evidence and conclusions of the protagonists of this school, however, vary on continental lines.

The emergence of large-scale steel industry in India under British colonial rule, 1880-1907

Abstract: before the great war, only a handful of countries were fully industrialised, only another handful were manifestly en route to industrialisation, only one of the industrialising countries was Asiatic, and none combined India’s poverty and complexity with its size .... This, one of the earliest, if not the earliest, ’attempt’ to industrialise a profoundly impoverished subcontinent, the conception and abortion of the ’new industrial policy’ has a relevance extending beyond the Indian experience.’ I

The demography of the Bengal famine of 1943-44: A detailed study

Abstract: The author analyzes the causes and consequences of the Bengal famine of the early 1940s which it is concluded "occurred under a unique set of circumstances largely related to War-induced inflation and very inefficient management of prices and food distribution." Excess deaths over the course of the famine were probably around 2.1 million. (EXCERPT)

Theatre state or box office state? A note on the political economy of eighteenth century India:

Abstract: a voracious despotism, ruthlessly expending the lives and properties of its hapless subjects and controlling them with merciless violence. This twodimensional image was certainly in need of correction, and has been criticised by a number of scholars, one of the most notable being Clifford Geertz.’ It is certainly important to emphasise the extent to which the ancien regime in Asia had to secure the loyalty or at least the consent of its

The social role of a caste association

Abstract: social status fixed for its members. Compared to their prototypes, the role of modern caste associations has changed quantitatively as well as qualitatively. This article analyses the role of a modern caste organisation, the Rungpore Kshatriya Samiti of the Rajbanshis of northern Bengal and Assam, tracing the social and economic background of the origin and development of the Samiti, and assessing its social role. This is in a way a case study’ of the

Foreign trade and the artisans in colonial India: a study of leather

Abstract: Most kinds of crafts in mid-nineteenth century India can be classified into two types: commodities and non-marketed services.’ Whether a craft functioned as a service or as a commodity depended on the product and on the producer’s caste. Leather and agricultural implements were industries for which a clientele outside the village, or a market inside it, seem to have been rare. On the other hand, in textiles it was caste that usually distinguished the sellers of a commodity from the provides of a service. The

Book Reviews : GEOFFREY A. ODDIE, Hindu and Christian in South-east India (London Studies on South Asia No. 6), Curzon Press, London, 1991, x + 280 pp

Abstract: By 1912, the Government of India had abandoned their 1898 position. Anticipating the possibility of a Russian occupation of Chinese Central Asia, they suggested that a precondition for border negotiations must be the acceptance of a line that would include within India not only the Aksai Chin, but also Shahidullah and the Raskam and Taghdumbash regions north of Hunza. And there, as far as Shahidullah and the Aksai Chin are concerned, Professor Mehra brings the story to an end. He analyses at length the detaching of Raskam from Hunza in the 1920s and 1930s; but on the final settlement of the border in the Ladakh sector if there was on~he