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The Indian Treasure Trove Act of 1878 is understood as a landmark legislative victory in the preservation of South Asian material pasts. This paper presents a detailed archival history recounting how archaeologists themselves were crucial to the promulgation of the Act and the authors of its specific provisions. It demonstrates how arguments for the reform of royal prerogative into an instrument for the discipline were born in mid-nineteenth-century British debates, where archaeologists' attempts for a similar statutory change in property laws had been frustrated. Centuries-long tensions in common law definitions and their governance of treasure are demonstrated to be crucial to how we may better understand the new 'policy' of the colonial law and its operation. To do so, the paper reviews select cases and presents an evaluation of the archaeological justice of the rule of this law. It asks why our critical historiography has remained insensible to the victims of this law — archaeology's counter-publics — who have been routinely incarcerated and punished in the name of the greater archaeological common good. Through these examinations, the paper reflects upon the enduring sensibilities and commitments that are involved in continuing to take treasures from others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The career in India of the Fleet Street journalist F.W. Wilson as editor of The Pioneer (1928–29) is a fascinating episode in the endgame of empire. Catapulted into the editorship of this reactionary colonial newspaper by a British management anxious to rescue its waning fortunes, Wilson sought to widen its appeal beyond a colonial British readership by embracing an anti-government, campaigning agenda which would enlist Indian middle-class audiences. This paper assesses the evidence for Wilson's radicalisation of The Pioneer's editorial stance in the context of India's freedom struggle, and the extent to which new editorial methods and approaches were introduced. It explores Wilson's contacts with leading Indian politicians, his efforts to ‘Indianise’ the content of the paper, the success of this editorial strategy in attracting advertising and key episodes which brought about The Pioneer's outright conflict with the government of India and his removal as editor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper contributes to the special issue by offering a new framework in time periods that demonstrates the changing nature of the intellectual transfer to and from colonial India and to posit the imperatives that drove these changes. It shows that the nature of educational exchange in India was transformed in elemental ways during the colonial phase. And that this transformation ultimately produced an intellectual separation between East and West; a separation that pre-empted what was to happen on the broader canvas of Indian national politics in the early twentieth century. For studies such as this one the state remains paradigmatic. The colonial experience in India was highly nuanced as indigenous collaborators, settler societies and ex-patriots formed networks of exchange that fed into the empire at large. Understanding this complexity is essential groundwork for better analysing broader networks that transcended nation and empire, metropole and colony. Colonial rule valorised particular institutional forms of education, some imported from the “home” country, some from other domains, as part of the uneven process of empire-building. In reaction to this the nationalist struggle did not construct its own educational idiom, it adapted the one already shaped by experimentation and imposition mostly created by the Empire at Home/Empire Abroad relationship of the colonial era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]