Empire on their Backs: Coolies in the Eastern Borderlands of the British Raj

Dzüvichü, Lipokmar

doi:10.1017/s0020859014000170

Cited by 6 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…32 There are multiple examples of this local population being pressed into servicing military and police punitive British expeditions. These histories are being written now (Dzüvichü, 2014;Van Schendel, 2018). One could say in such labour histories North-East moves beyond Assam and climbs the hills.…”

Section: The Shoots Of Identity In the Inadequately National And Economicmentioning

confidence: 99%

Genealogies of exception: Writing histories of North‐East India

Sen

2021

History Compass

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The North-East in India is a shorthand for a territory built on violence, commodity extraction and exceptional laws. For years now, the region has nurtured a stygian discontent. However, instead of succumbing to the despair and disapproval of technocrats and security personnel such crises usually evokes, one can find political and analytical sustenance in such turbulent histories. Often in the histories of 'failed' states, 'disturbed' frontiers and borderlands, one finds cyphers to modern governance. In this sense, the North-East is quite au courant. In this analytically productive sense, the essay will discuss the recent and older trends of historiographies of the North-East. How is the North-East located within South Asian historiography? How does it speak to academic collectives beyond the Indian/South Asian historiography? How does the political discord and potential of the region shape academic engagements? Answers to these questions will provide insight into the production and nature of academic silos or lumps as the North-East simultaneously poses as a political problematic at the heart of Indian democracy and a component of an emergent field of South-Asian, South-East Asian and global scholarship.

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Section: The Shoots Of Identity In the Inadequately National And Economicmentioning

confidence: 99%

Genealogies of exception: Writing histories of North‐East India

Sen

2021

History Compass

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“…Historians studying convict labour have related it to either the state's economic considerations to employ them or to the 19th century utilitarian ideas about 'hard labour' as punishment (Joshi, 2012). In the frontiers and the borderlands of the empire, road building projects were also part of a complex network of practices that included the surveillance, taxation; enumeration and subordination of the hill populations to wage labour (Dzüvichü, 2014).…”

Section: IIImentioning

confidence: 99%

Infrastructure and public works in colonial India: Towards a conceptual history

Ramesh

Raveendranathan

2020

History Compass

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In 1697, the author Daniel Defoe, famous for his novel Robinson Crusoe, wrote a book titled Essays Upon Projects.The word 'projects', during Defoe's times, meant unscrupulous means of making money, usually by building structures, such as housing or public utilities. The 'age of projects' as Defoe (1702) called it, inaugurated an era preoccupied with the built form. In the 19th century, this built form consolidated as 'improvement', or governments seeking to uplift subjects by building public works projects. In the 20th century, governments, private finance and experts all came together to recreate ideas of improvement into that of development or a common condition of progress for human kind. A key facet allowing a variety of actors to 'improve' and 'develop' societies has been infrastructure. That is, built forms which facilitate and enable (and disable) social life, economic activity, commerce, movement and aid colonial and postcolonial state formation.We employ the term infrastructure in an analytical fashion, arguing that a variety of new histories, in this case of colonial South Asia, can be anchored around the concept of infrastructure. Specifically, we argue that using infrastructure as a heuristic category allows for a re-evaluation of the history of the political economy of modern South Asia, which has been studied through the prisms of space, capital and the social. Anthropological research has defined infrastructures as physical and material objects, such as roads or water pipes, through which people, capital, finance, non-humans and technologies move through. Brian Larkin shows how anthropologists have explored the political rationalities that underlie technological projects, the systems that infrastructures are implicated within and the affect and sentiment they inspire. Other interventions have conceptualized infrastructure as a social relation (Elyachar, 2010) and as a form of 'calculative reason' (Mitchell, 2001) which informs a vast field including governance, engineering, transport and communication (Carse, 2017). To quote Larkin (2013, 339) again there are a number of ways to 'analyse and conceive of infrastructures'. However as Nikhil Anand, Hannah Appel and Akhil Gupta (Anand et al., 2018, pp. 8-9) argue, most ethnographies study the neoliberal era, but there is little discussion of the 'public'

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Indian Rivers, ‘Productive Works’, and the Emergence of Large Dams in Nineteenth-Century Madras

Ramesh

2020

Hist. J.

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The nineteenth century witnessed a major expansion in the construction of public works including canals, roads, and railways across the British empire. The question that colonial governments faced during the nineteenth century was on how to finance public works. Focusing specifically on irrigation works and the rivers of southern India, this article shows how different experiments were attempted, including raising capital and labour from local communities as well as corporate investment in irrigation works through London capital markets. The article argues that by the latter part of the nineteenth century, a definitive answer had emerged, i.e. irrigation projects on rivers would be financed through state debt. An enormous body of scholarship in Britain and India debated the relationship between public works and public debt. This article rethinks this scholarship as a technological and environmental history. The article argues that colonial modes of raising capital were dependent on speculating on Indian rivers. Historiography wise, in contrast to scholarship which takes for granted the role of the state in building large dams, it suggests that the emergence of the state as the builder of large dams was part of a more fundamental relationship between rivers, technology, and colonial capital that emerged in the nineteenth century.

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Empire on their Backs: Coolies in the Eastern Borderlands of the British Raj

Cited by 6 publications

References 9 publications

Genealogies of exception: Writing histories of North‐East India

Genealogies of exception: Writing histories of North‐East India

Infrastructure and public works in colonial India: Towards a conceptual history

Indian Rivers, ‘Productive Works’, and the Emergence of Large Dams in Nineteenth-Century Madras

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