This volume brings together thirteen papers to capture the interaction between India and China in the colonial world. Lucidly written, these essays are especially interesting in the context of the current political and economic relations between the two countries. Each essay covers not only trade and cultural relations and the establishment of overseas communities but also the links between the political struggles in the two countries as well as some aspects of the situation during and after the Second World War. Madhavi Thampiteaches Chinese History in the Department of East Asian Studies of Delhi University. She is the author ofIndians in China, 1800-1949 (Manohar, 2005). She is currently researching the role of the China Trade in the growth and development of Mumbai.

A history of capitalism in nineteenth‑ and twentieth‑century China and India that explores the competition between their tea industries “Tea War is not only a detailed comparative history of the transformation of tea production in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but it also intervenes in larger debates about the nature of capitalism, global modernity, and global history.”— Alexander F. Day, Occidental College Tea remains the world’s most popular commercial drink today, and at the turn of the twentieth century, it represented the largest export industry of both China and colonial India. In analyzing the global competition between Chinese and Indian tea, Andrew B. Liu challenges past economic histories premised on the technical “divergence” between the West and the Rest, arguing instead that seemingly traditional technologies and practices were central to modern capital accumulation across Asia. He shows how competitive pressures compelled Chinese merchants to adopt abstract industrial conceptions of time, while colonial planters in India pushed for labor indenture laws to support factory-style tea plantations. Characterizations of China and India as premodern backwaters, he explains, were themselves the historical result of new notions of political economy adopted by Chinese and Indian nationalists, who discovered that these abstract ideas corresponded to concrete social changes in their local surroundings. Together, these stories point toward a more flexible and globally oriented conceptualization of the history of capitalism in China and India.

Contributed articles on foreign relations between India and China presented earlier at a seminar held in November 2000.

The China Relief Expedition, an eight-nation military effort, was organized to rescue foreign nationals in the country during the Boxer Uprising (1899–1901). In Thirteen Months in China, Thakur Gadadhar Singh, a British Indian soldier of the 7th Rajput Regiment, recounts his experiences as he set sail along with his men for Beijing in the summer of 1900. Written shortly after his return to India in 1901, he details several aspects of China and its people he met over the course of thirteen months. Part travelogue, part history, Singh’s eyewitness account offers a first-hand view of the tumultuous events of the Boxer Uprising and its aftermath, as also of Chinese society, culture, politics, religion, and art and architecture, often in a comparative perspective. It is a rare historical source of an Indian subaltern’s outlook on the history of China, and its customs and practices.

In The Circulation of Knowledge Between Britain, India and China, twelve scholars examine how knowledge, things and people moved within, and between, the East and the West from the early modern period to the twentieth century. The collection starts by looking at the ways and means that knowledge circulated, first in Europe, but then beyond to India and China. It engages the knowledge and encounters of those Europeans as they moved across the globe. It participates in the attempt to open up more nuanced and balanced trajectories of colonial and post-colonial encounters. By focusing on exchange, translation, and resistance, the authors bring into the spotlight many "bit-players" and things originally relegated to the margins in the development of late modern science. Contributors include Karen Smith, Larry Stewart, Savrithri Preetha Nair, Jan Golinski, Arun Bala, Jonathan Topham, Khyati Nagar, Yang Haiyan, Fa-ti Fan, Grace Yen Shen, Jahnavi Phalkey, Veena Rao, and Sundar Sarukkai.

The circulations of knowledge -- The routes, networks, and objects of circulation -- The imperial connections -- Pan-Asianism and the (re)new(ed) connections -- The geopolitical disconnect -- Conclusion

This Is The First In-Depth Study Of The Indian Community In China In The Colonial Era. It Is Not A Study Of All Indians Who Were In China In The Period From 1800 To 1949, But Is About Two Largest Socio-Economic Groups - The Merchants On The One Hand, And The Category Of Soldiers, Policemen, And Watchmen On The Other Hand. It Aims To Bring To Light The Factors That Brought Them To China And Kept Them There, Their Activities In China, The Nature Of Their Interaction With The Chinese And The British In China, The Problems And Difficulties They Faced, And The Factors That Eventually Impelled Them To Leave China - In Short, The Broad Range Of Their Experience As Aliens In The Chinese Environment.