This volume examines the rhetorics used around race and famine in the colonies vis-à-vis the persistence of hunger and poverty in the island nation/empire. As William Booth reminded the British in his aptly titled In Darkest England (1890), one need not look further than London’s underbelly to find intractable hunger.

Famine remains one of the worst calamities that can befall a society. Mass starvation--whether it is inflicted by drought or engineered by misguided or genocidal economic policies--devastates families, weakens the social fabric, and undermines political stability. Cormac Ó Gráda, the acclaimed author who chronicled the tragic Irish famine in books like Black '47 and Beyond, here traces the complete history of famine from the earliest records to today. Combining powerful storytelling with the latest evidence from economics and history, Ó Gráda explores the causes and profound consequences of famine over the past five millennia, from ancient Egypt to the killing fields of 1970s Cambodia, from the Great Famine of fourteenth-century Europe to the famine in Niger in 2005. He enriches our understanding of the most crucial and far-reaching aspects of famine, including the roles that population pressure, public policy, and human agency play in causing famine; how food markets can mitigate famine or make it worse; famine's long-term demographic consequences; and the successes and failures of globalized disaster relief. Ó Gráda demonstrates the central role famine has played in the economic and political histories of places as different as Ukraine under Stalin, 1940s Bengal, and Mao's China. And he examines the prospects of a world free of famine. This is the most comprehensive history of famine available, and is required reading for anyone concerned with issues of economic development and world poverty.

This book, first published in 1975, is a comprehensive list of all the books on India, written in English before 1900. It is an invaluable reference source on India of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Apart from the work of professional writers, there are the writings of a cross-section of society from soldiers to scientists. We find dictionaries of obscure dialects written by government officials, descriptions of their travels by visiting clerics, homely details of everyday life by housewives, as well as technical and scientific works written by scholars.

This book examines aspects of the production of statistical knowledge as part of colonial governance in India using Foucault’s ideas of “governmentality.” The modern state is distinctive for its bureaucratic organization, official procedures, and accountability that in the colonial context of governing at a distance instituted a vast system of recordation bearing semblance to and yet differing markedly from the Victorian administrative state. The colonial rule of difference that shaped liberal governmentality introduced new categories of rule that were nested in the procedures and records and could be unraveled from the archive of colonial governance. Such an exercise is attempted here for certain key epistemic categories such as space, time, measurement, classification and causality that have enabled the constitution of modern knowledge and the social scientific discourses of “economy,” “society,” and “history.” The different chapters engage with how enumerative technologies of rule led to proliferating measurements and classifications as fields and objects came within the purview of modern governance rendering both statistical knowledge and also new ways of acting on objects and new discourses of governance and the nation. The postcolonial implications of colonial governmentality are examined with respect to both planning techniques for attainment of justice and the role of information in the constitution of neoliberal subjects.

The result of extensive archival recovery work, Ellen Brinks's study fills a significant gap in our understanding of women's literary history of the South Asian subcontinent under colonialism and of Indian women's contributions and responses to developing cultural and political nationalism. As Brinks shows, the invisibility of Anglophone Indian women writers cannot be explained simply as a matter of colonial marginalization or as a function of dominant theoretical approaches that reduce Indian women to the status of figures or tropes. The received narrative that British imperialism in India was perpetuated with little cultural contact between the colonizers and the colonized population is complicated by writers such as Toru Dutt, Krupabai Satthianadhan, Pandita Ramabai, Cornelia Sorabji, and Sarojini Naidu. All five women found large audiences for their literary works in India and in Great Britain, and all five were also deeply rooted in and connected to both South Asian and Western cultures. Their works created new zones of cultural contact and exchange that challenge postcolonial theory's tendencies towards abstract notions of the colonized women as passive and of English as a de-facto instrument of cultural domination. Brinks's close readings of these texts suggest new ways of reading a range of issues central to postcolonial studies: the relationship of colonized women to the metropolitan (literary) culture; Indian and English women's separate and joint engagements in reformist and nationalist struggles; the 'translatability' of culture; the articulation strategies and complex negotiations of self-identification of Anglophone Indian women writers; and the significance and place of cultural difference.