Decentring Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World
Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy
Price
2340
ISBN
9788125029823
Language
English
Pages
420
Format
Hardback
Dimensions
140 x 216 mm
Year of Publishing
2006
Territorial Rights
WORLD
Imprint
Orient BlackSwan
Catalogues

This volume charts a new direction in the study of British imperialism, its impact on India and other colonial territories, and its influence in propelling the forces of globalisation. Moving beyond the standard model of a bilateral circuit between imperial centre and colonial periphery, it highlights instead the web of transcolonial and transnational networks that spread across and beyond the empire, operating both on its behalf and against its interests. It suggests that these networks worked in effect to decentre empire, shaping the multidimensional contours of the global modernity we contend with today. Decentring Empire brings together thirteen original essays by some of the leading scholars of British imperialism, their contributions offered in honour of Thomas R. Metcalf, the distinguished historian of colonial India. The essays range widely in scope, moving in time from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century, in space from India to Ireland and Australia and elsewhere across the imperial map, and in topic from economic, political, and social to medical, legal, and cultural concerns. Taken together, they demonstrate the analytical richness of current scholarship on British colonialism in India and elsewhere and give fresh insights into its role in the making of the modern world. This is history at the cutting edge, an important contribution to the ongoing debate about empire and its consequences.

DURBA GHOSH is Assistant Professor of History at Cornell University. She has published articles in the Historical Journal, Modern Asian Studies, the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, and several edited volumes. DANE KENNEDY is the Elmer Louis Kayser Professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He is the author of several books on British colonialism, including The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj (1996). His intellectual biography of Sir Richard Burton, The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World was published in 2005.