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The paper examines the introduction of trained female nurses for the British army men in colonial India between 1888 and 1920. It discusses the genesis of the Indian Nursing Service (INS), including the background and negotiations leading up to its formation, terms of employment, duties and working conditions of the nursing sisters. The memoir of Catharine Grace Loch, who served as the first Chief Lady Superintendent of the service is used extensively to trace the early experiences and challenges of the nursing sisters. The paper primarily argues that the INS being a new service, the colonial government maintained tight control over its functioning, and extreme conservatism in spending, thus retarding the growth of professional army nursing in India. Secondly, in examining the relations between the sisters and the (male) nursing orderlies, sub-medical and medical officers, the paper argues that the inadequate delineation of the nursing sisters' position in the military medical hierarchy was an important reason for the undermining of their expertise and status. Thirdly, the paper contends that as an all-women service, nursing constituted an important avenue of female agency within the patriarchal colonial establishment, which subjected the sisters to scrutiny both professionally and socially. The paper analyses the resultant conditions and regulations imposed on the sisters – most of them determined by gender and class notions. Finally, the paper discusses the gradual establishment and recognition of the service as an important cornerstone for the health of the army, while highlighting the shortcomings that yet persisted up until 1920. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Anglo-Indian modernist architect and city planner Walter Sykes George and his influence from British architect Edwin Lutyens, who also worked in Delhi and New Delhi, India. The author examines George's letters with his family friend Anne Shearer and architectural theorist Hope Bagenal and offers an overview of George's career. Specific topics include George's appreciation for Classical architecture, his work for architect Herbert Baker in New Delhi, George's integration of Indian culture into his designs such as Kashmir House and St. Stephen's College, and his work in India after it gained independence from Great Britain.

This paper follows the careers of ‘outlawed’ Indian Muslim subjects who moved outside the geographical and political space of British India and located themselves at the intersection of nineteenth century trans-Asiatic politics: Hijaz, Istanbul and the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, and Burma and Acheh in the East. These areas were sites where ‘modern’ Empires (British, Dutch, Ottoman and Russian) coalesced to lay out a trans-Asiatic imperial assemblage. The paper shows how Muslim ‘outlaws’ made careers and carved out their transnational networks by moving across the imperial assemblages of the nineteenth century. British colonial rule, being an important spoke in the imperial wheel, enabled much of this transnationalism to weld together. Webs of connections derived from older forms of Islamic connectivity as well: diplomacy, kinship ties, the writing of commentaries on Islam and its sacred texts in unique ways, oral traditions, madrasa and student contacts. These networks were inclusive and impacted by the tanzimat-inspired scriptural reformist thought in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. They were not narrowly anti-colonial in tone as they derived from a complex inter-play of imperial rivalries in the region. Rather, they were geared towards the triumph of reformist Islam that would unite the umma (community) and engage with the European world order. The paper shows how this imperially-embedded and individual-driven Muslim transnational network linked with Muslim politics rooted within India. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

By the turn of the twentieth century a distinct ‘social domain’ – along with its constituent parts, problems and internal dynamics – was turned into a political entity, and a concern for state bureaucracies existed across the industrializing world. Specific motivations for this trend may have varied from location to location, but included arguments for higher industrial productivity and less political discontent, often intertwined with a humanitarian impulse in calls for better housing, expanded public health or improved working conditions. As has been well documented, the politicization of the social domain in early twentieth-century Britain owes much to the consolidation of British sociology as a distinct discipline. Yet while the link between the rise of social politics and sociology has been established with regard to Britain, little has been said about the occurrence of this coupling elsewhere in the twentieth-century British Empire. This article aims to rectify that omission by showing the interplay between newly raised social concerns of the colonial administration in the Bombay Presidency, Western British India, and the establishing of sociological research within the borders of the Presidency around the time of the First World War. The article will explore how the colonial administration in Bombay planned to meet new demands for sociological knowledge in colonial state policy, how sociology was subsequently introduced into the Presidency as a research subject, and how new sociological methods were applied in actual colonial government. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

One of the most contentious political issues in postcolonial India is the unfulfilled project of a ‘uniform civil code’ which would override the existing ‘personal laws’ or religion-based laws of domestic relations, inheritance and religious institutions. If the personal laws are admitted to be preserved (if somewhat distorted) remnants of ‘religious laws’, then the legitimacy of state intervention is called into question, especially since the Indian state claims to be secular. This paper, by discussing the history of the lesser-known Christian personal law, demonstrates that this conundrum is of considerable heritage. From the earliest days of British imperial rule in India, the quest to establish a universal body of law conflicted with other legal principles which upheld difference: that of religion, as well as race. It was the historical role of Indian Christians to occasion legal dilemmas regarding the jurisdictions of British and ‘native’ law, and concurrently about the identity of people subject to those different laws. In trying to discover who the Indian Christians were, and what laws ought to apply to them, British judges had perforce to reflect on who the ‘British’ were, whilst also dealing with conflicting collective claims made by Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, and Christians themselves about their own identity and religious rights. The Indian Christian personal law was an unintended by-product of this process, a finding which throws light both on the dynamics of colonial legislation, and on the essentially modern nature of Indian personal laws. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role of what might be termed embodied experience in generating knowledge about climate - specifically by focusing on conversations about the effects of climate on the body in late nineteenth-century India. Central to the story is the question of how race maps onto ideas about the body's capacity to register or perceive its environment, and how this question articulates with concerns about standardization and judgement in scientific practice. Focusing on tropical heat, I argue that the British body became figured in late colonial scientific discourse as a kind of sensing technology, one that was transformed by the heat that it registered. However, determining the effects of heat on the body was not always straightforward; the sensation of heat was, at moments, attributed not to heat but instead to light. At stake in this partial displacement from heat to light was not the sensation itself, nor the bodily effects it produced, but rather the mechanisms that produced these sensations and effects. Nevertheless, observing these racialized bodily effects was a way to know climate, arguably as important as recording data from thermometers. Along these lines, pigmentation became a powerful, if imperfect, marker of racial difference that was also thought to confer specific sensory capacities on some and not on others. And it was through these capacities, through the perceived ability of certain bodies (and not others) to register the effects of heat and light, that knowledge of climate became intimately tied to ideas about race and biology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an exploration into the history of the British silver trade in India in the late 18th century. Details are given citing and criticizing prevailing historical views that silver was not a major sector of British commercial interest. It is asserted that the British export of silver was conducted on a large scale after 1785 for trade, debt-relief and military finance. An overview is given of several British firms in India, particularly the East India Company from the late 18th century into the early 19th.

The East India Company began to establish lending libraries for soldiers at its stations in India from about 1891 and, by the early 1830s, the majority of those responsible for the day-to-day operation of these institutions were keen to stress their beneficial effect upon the readers who frequented them. In a series of reports that were written at this time station chaplains and commanding officers emphasised that reading was having a positive effect upon the men's behaviour. What also emerges from these reports is evidence of a contemporary belief that the ‘setting’ in which reading took place determined the degree to which the activity was beneficial. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent years, discussion of technology in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century colonial world has moved away from earlier insistence on the centrality of imperial agency and the instrumentality of empire's technological “tools” of conquest and exploitation. There has been a broad shift from diffusionist preoccupations with a one-way traffic in “technology transfers” that privileged Euro-American innovation and entrepreneurship, to consideration of the “social life of things” within the colony. This has corresponded with a move away from understanding technology through European representations of machines as the measure of the imperial self and colonized other, to rethinking technology's role in reconfiguring social hierarchies and cultural practices in colonized or semi-colonized non-Western societies. Without ignoring empire's importance in facilitating change or restricting the socio-economic parameters within which innovative technologies might operate, there has been a growing tendency to identify colonialism as a conduit for technological modernity rather than its primary embodiment. The colony is understood as a locally constituted, rather than merely imperially derivative, site for engagement with techno-modernity and its discontents. Scholars now commonly eschew emphasis on the implanting of “big technologies” such as railroads, telegraphs, steamships, modern weaponry, major irrigation works, and electrification systems (capital-intensive, often state-managed technologies that figured proudly in the rhetoric of imperial achievement), in favor of the ways in which these were understood, assimilated, and utilized by local agency. There has also been growing interest in small-scale, “everyday technologies,” from the sewing machine, wristwatch, and radio, to the typewriter, camera, and bicycle. Colonial regimes were unable to monopolize or disinclined to control these, and they passed with relative ease into the work-regimes, recreational activities, social life, and cultural aspirations of colonized and postcolonial populations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scholars are looking again at banking and mercantile families in India's early modern history, responding to the challenge issued by Claude Markovits in the epilogue of his 2008 volume, Merchants, Traders, Entrepreneurs, to “return the merchant to South Asian history.” Some of the underlying assumptions and questions being asked are old and some are new. My own longstanding assumption, upon which this article relies, has been that bankers and merchants played multiple and important roles with respect to states in South Asia, and that their relations with non-kin officials and other political actors determined their success or failure and sometimes the success or failure of a state, most notably, the Mughal state. Questions are again being raised about “trust,” assumed to be a leading attribute of and asset to financial networks (especially in long-distance trade diasporas), and the notion so commonly put forward by scholars to explain the success of Hindu banking and mercantile communities. Recent work by Francesca Trivellato has found that membership in the Sephardic trade diaspora facilitated but did not guarantee trust or cooperation: the Sephardic merchants relied on non-Jewish as well as Jewish agents and networks of information, and evolving legal norms guided their business activities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, focusing on his first solo command in the British Army in India as a Lieutenant-Colonel organizing a military campaign against Indian insurgent Dhoondiah Vagh in 1800. The author asserts that the three-month campaign was a more complex military endeavor than historically believed, based on new historical evidence. Some of the subjects considered includes British imperialism in India in the nineteenth century, the British colonial administration of India, and the development of the military career of the future Duke of Wellington.

The article considers biographical information for Narain Sing as a means of exploring punishment, society, and social transformation in British occupied India between of the Anglo-Sikh Wars and the Great Indian Revolt of 1857-1858. Sing was a military general convicted of treason by the British and sentenced to transportation after the annexation of the Panjab in 1849. After being sent to the East India Company’s penal settlement in Burma, he was appointed head police constable of Moulmein in 1861. His military service, conviction, and incarceration provide insight into issues of honour, masculinity, and status. The author considers his life within the broader context of resistance against the expansion of British authority in the Panjab and the development of Anglo-Sikh relations.

The article presents an overview of the non-governmental famine relief efforts which were carried out in India between 1896 and 1901. Details are provided outlining the accomplishments of middle class Indians, overseas Christian missionaries, and non-official British residents who contributed to the voluntary charity work. Comments are given analyzing the transition seen within British colonial attitudes over the role of government and charity in the nation as well as examining the emergence of Indian self-directed social service.

The article presents an overview of the history of beriberi disease, a malady which was endemic in British colonial India throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. Details are given overviewing the discovery, investigation, and eventual curing of the illness by British doctors in India over the given period. Attention is particularly given to the development of the medical research into the disease which led to false theories. The theories and accomplishments of physicians such as Patrick Manson, John Grant Malcolmson, and Robert McCarrison are profiled in-depth.

The period 1861 to 1920 witnessed sharp price convergence in British Indian grain markets. Previous research attributed this to the construction of railways. But tests examining price differences between districts provide surprisingly weak support for that hypothesis. Railways mattered, but seem capable of explaining only about 20 percent of the decline in price dispersion. One explanation may be that India was a partially integrated economy at the time of railroad expansion. Lines connecting districts on preexisting trade routes had very small price effects. There is also some evidence of a "border effect" on lines between British India and princely states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role that Ireland and Irish people played in the geographical construction of British colonial rule in India during the nineteenth century. It argues that as an important sub-imperial centre, Ireland not only supplied the empire with key personnel, but also functioned as an important reference point for scientific practice, new legislation, and systems of government. Occupying integral roles within the information systems of the colonial state, Irish people provided much of the intellectual capital around which British rule in India was constructed. These individuals were part of nineteenth-century Irish professional personnel networks that viewed the empire as a legitimate sphere for work and as an arena in which they could prosper. Through involvement and deployment of expertise in areas such as surveying and geological research in India, Irishmen and Irish institutions were able to act decisively in the development of colonial knowledge. The relationships mapped in this article centre the Irish within the imperial web of connections and global exchange of ideas, technologies, and practices during the long nineteenth century, thereby making a contribution towards uncovering Ireland's multi-directional involvement in the British empire and reassessing the challenges that this presents to existing British, Irish, and imperial historiography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on how the decision was made to use the Urdu language at Osmania University in Hyderabad, India. It explores how the university's educators dealt with issues of native education, language, colonialism, and Western science in the early twentieth century. The author considers issues of politics, religion, and education relative not only to Urdu, but to English and Hindi in colonial India. The article also considers Urdu scholar and Muslim leader Maulvi Abdul Haq, the Khilafat Movement as part of the broader Indian independence movement, and the effect that World War I had upon the British empire in the 1920s.

This article examines Anglo-Hindu laws of inheritance and succession for the period between 1860 and 1940. The author explores how the Shaivite ascetic order of Giri Dasnamis in northern India used British rules regarding religion to guarantee that their monastery was retained by their Hindi religious order. The article also considers how ascetic monastic orders made use of the British colonial administration to maintain their masculine identities and renounce any family ties with women and children who may have held claims of kinship and property with members of their orders.

This article examines the impact of the opium trade in India during the years of British imperialism in the early nineteenth century on economic development in the country. It focuses particularly on the trading of opium cultivated in Malwa, India to Sindh, Pakistan, and considers how this ultimately integrated Sindh into the broader British imperial trading system. The author critiques arguments on the matter set forth in the book "Smuggling as Subversion: Colonialism, Indian Merchants and the Politics of Opium," by Amar Farooqi.

This article discusses strikes organized by railway workers in the Indian states of Bihar and Bengal between 1918 and 1922. This labour unrest is explored in terms of the dynamic role of race and nationalism in workers politics. The limiting factors in institutionalised oppressions based on race, class, or nationalism are explored. The pageantry and social relations that attended the process of labour mobilisation and the event of striking are analysed. Conflicts among Indian populations regarding the social significance of British technologies such as the railways are assessed.

This article discusses the role of labour contractors, called sardars, in the recruitment of Indian indentured workers for service in India and abroad in British Guiana and Mauritius. These contractors were the local contacts of recruiters, called arkatis, who led groups of labourers to their colonial employments. The costs and benefits of the sardars as economic agents are discussed in terms of the impact of colonialism and traditional labour conditions on the social organisation of work in India. The relationship between the sardars and the recruited labourers is framed in terms of the traditional social organisation of South Asia.

This article discusses the treatment of race in the colonial legal system of India between 1810 and 1863. The Abraham family, which was of Tamil and English origin, dealt with legal issues of race in the process of interfamilial litigation in the case Abraham v. Abraham. This case concerned the disposition of Matthew Abraham's fortune following his death in 1842. Matthew's wife Charlotte and her children stood to inherit the property under English law, but his brother Francis stood to inherit under Hindu law. The question of jurisdiction turned on issues of female agency, race, and the conflict between market capitalism and traditional Hindu practices.

This article discusses the career of the Danish botanist Nathaniel Wallich, who served as the superintendent of the Calcutta, India Botanic Garden between 1815 and 1846. In this period Wallich developed scientific approaches to the plant life of South Asia that influenced the commercial position of the English East India Company. The interpretation of Wallich's life as a botanist and forester is reinterpreted as an economically interested approach to the management and improvement of the East India Company's commercial projects. Wallich had been accepted uncritically as a pioneer of forest conservation because of his advocacy on behalf of forestry restoration, but this author maintains that his work followed the commercial interests of the East India Company.

Describes the British society in India under the East India Company's rule. Presence of social divisions of British's representation in India; Role of British women; Patterns of employment in India under British regime; Conditions of British soldiers.

Explores role of forests in India's colonial history. Dialectical relationships between discourses of rule and protest; Colonial state discourse and forestry; Influence of the control and representation of the past n colonialism; Effect of the degradation of the environment to the subsistence economies of the rural poor.

Analyzes the potentialities of development in the economy of Mughal, India prior to British imperialism. Weaknesses in Indian society which contributed to the failure of India to industrialize according to proponents of British rule; Role of British imperialism in the subsistence economy of India.