A fascinating study of the role played by the Indian princes in the devolution of British colonial power.

This book charts the history of artisan production and marketing in the Bombay Presidency from 1870 to 1960. While the textile mills of western India's biggest cities have been the subject of many rich studies, the role of artisan producers located in the region's small towns have been virtually ignored. Based upon extensive archival research as well as numerous interviews with participants in the handloom and powerloom industries, this book explores the role of weavers, merchants, consumers and laborers in the making of what the author calls 'small-town capitalism'. By focusing on the politics of negotiation and resistance in local workshops, the book challenges conventional narratives of industrial change. The book provides the first in-depth work on the origins of powerloom manufacture in South Asia. It affords unique insights into the social and economic experience of small-town artisans as well as the informal economy of late colonial and early post-independence India.

Two distinguished historians, Barbara Metcalf and Thomas Metcalf, come together to write a new and accessible account of modern India. The narrative, which charts the history of India from the Mughals, through the colonial encounter and independence, to the present day, challenges imperialist notions of an unchanging and monolithic India bounded by tradition and religious hierarchies. Instead the book reveals a complex society which is constantly transforming and reinventing itself in response to political and social challenges. The book is beautifully composed and richly illustrated. It will be essential reading for anyone who wants to understand India, her turbulent past and her present uncertainties.

Interest in Shi'a Islam has increased greatly in recent years, although Shi'ism in the Indian subcontinent has remained largely underexplored. Focusing on the influential Shi'a minority of Lucknow and the United Provinces, a region that was largely under Shi'a rule until 1856, this book traces the history of Indian Shi'ism through the colonial period toward independence in 1947. Drawing on a range of new sources, including religious writing, polemical literature and clerical biography, it assesses seminal developments including the growth of Shi'a religious activism, madrasa education, missionary activity, ritual innovation and the politicization of the Shi'a community. As a consequence of these significant religious and social transformations, a Shi'a sectarian identity developed that existed in separation from rather than in interaction with its Sunni counterparts. In this way the painful birth of modern sectarianism was initiated, the consequences of which are very much alive in South Asia today.

The figure of the white hunter sahib proudly standing over the carcass of a tiger with a gun in hand is one of the most powerful and enduring images of the empire. This book examines the colonial politics that allowed British imperialists to indulge in such grand posturing as the rulers and protectors of indigenous populations. This work studies the history of hunting and conservation in colonial India during the high imperial decades of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At this time, not only did hunting serve as a metaphor for colonial rule signifying the virile sportsmanship of the British hunter, but it also enabled vital everyday governance through the embodiment of the figure of the officer–hunter–administrator. Using archival material and published sources, the author examines hunting and wildlife conservation from various social and ethnic perspectives, and also in different geographical contexts, extending our understanding of the link between shikar and governance.

Examines the political worldview of courtly and royal women in India during the late colonial and post-Independence period. This book offers a history of the zenana, which served as the 'women's courts' or 'female quarters of the palace', where women lived behind pardah in seclusion.

This is an invaluable work looking into new areas relating to India's princely states. Based on an abundance of rarely used archival material, the book sheds new light on diversities related to the princely states such as health policies and practices, gender issues, the states’ military contribution or the mechanisms for controlling or integrating the states. Contributions are from international, reputable scholars, and they present historiographic, analytical and methodological approaches, placing attention to concepts, theories and sources. Inter-disciplinary in nature, this book will appeal to scholars and researchers of South Asia, studies of transnational histories, cultural and racial studies, international politics and economic history and the social history of health and medicine.