Historians of British colonial rule in India have noted both the place of military might and the imposition of new cultural categories in the making of Empire, but Bhavani Raman, in "Document Raj," uncovers a lesser-known story of power: the power of bureaucracy. Drawing on extensive archival research in the files of the East India Company s administrative offices in Madras, she tells the story of a bureaucracy gone awry in a fever of documentation practices that grew ever more abstract and the power, both economic and cultural, this created.In order to assert its legitimacy and value...
Historians of British colonial rule in India have noted both the place of military might and the imposition of new cultural categories in the makin...
This volume reflects a recent transformation of the concerns of social scientists regarding the legal history of South Asia. While, earlier, historians looked at the results rather than the performance of law, the concerns later shifted to unravelling the socioeconomic and political contexts that shaped law-making and its practice. Iterations of Law advances these new perspectives on legal history from South Asia. Going beyond an area studies rubric to critically engage with recent work in colonial and transnational legal history, the essays in this volume utilize both archival and everyday...
This volume reflects a recent transformation of the concerns of social scientists regarding the legal history of South Asia. While, earlier, historian...