The Great Rebellion of 1857 in India : Exploring Transgressions, Contests and Diversities

Manufacture at the colonial frontier : iron and salt production experiments in the East Indies, 1765-1858

Abstract: 5 Chapter 1 Rethinking Iron and Salt Manufacture in India, 1765-1858 9 Introduction Reassessment of the Historiography of Iron and Salt in Colonial India – Subject Matter of the Thesis – Chapter

Women becoming professionals: British secular reformers and missionaries in Colonial India, 1870-1900.

Abstract: Supervisory Committee Dr. Elizabeth Vibert, (Department of History) Supervisor Dr. Lynne Marks, (Department of History) Departmental Member This paper discusses the means by which some British women created professional roles for themselves out of their philanthropic work in India between 1880 and 1900. I examine the development of these roles in the missionary and secular philanthropic communities and how these women used periodicals as a space to implicitly demonstrate their competence and explicitly argue for their status as educators and medical workers. Colonial India provided a particular context of imperial ideals and gendered realities: Indian women were believed to be particularly deprived of learning, medical care and ―civilisation‖ by custom and culture, and Englishwomen could call on the rhetoric of imperial duty to legitimise their care of these disadvantaged women. I argue that India provided the means for British women to demonstrate their capabilities and to involve themselves in the ongoing nineteenth-century project to incorporate women into previously masculine professional societies.

The 1857 Panic and the Fabrication of an Indian ‘Menace’ in Singapore

Abstract: This paper examines how local and transnational developments converged in 1857 to transform European attitudes towards Indian inhabitants in Singapore. Recognized in preceding years as useful to the security and the development of the colony, by late 1857, Indians in Singapore had come to be viewed by Europeans as a ‘menace’. That change in disposition was largely the product of factors extraneous to the actions of the local Indian inhabitants themselves. Besieged by news of multiple challenges to the British Empire, European nerves were rattled by perceived threats emanating from sections of the Asian populace in Singapore. In early 1857, a dispute between Tamil-Muslims and Europeans brought to the fore the latter's anxieties and prejudices. That episode was followed, in May, by news of the massive rebellion of native troops in India. The emerging distrust for Indians was exacerbated by public rumours and fanned by editorials and reports published in the local press. Perceptions of immediate danger from the colony of transported convicts, and the fear of an Indian conspiracy during Muharram, sparked a panic that would have ramifications on the position of Indians in Singapore and leave an imprint on the long term political development of the Straits Settlements.1