Download or read book Local States in an Imperial World written by Roy S. Fischel and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-15 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the Deccan Sultanates of 16th- and 17th-century central India, Local States in an Imperial World promotes the idea that some polities of the time were not aspiring to be empires. Instead of the universalist and hierarchical vision typical of the language of empire, the sultanates presented another brand of state - one that prefers negotiation, flexibility and plurality of languages, religions and cultures. Building on theories of early modernity, empire, cosmopolitanism and vernaculars, Roy Fischel considers the components that shaped state and society: people, identities and idioms. He presents a frame for understanding the Deccan Sultanates as a rare case of the early modern non-imperial state, shedding light both on the region and on the imperial world surrounding it.
Download or read book Local States in an Imperial World written by Fischel Roy S. Fischel and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-15 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the Deccan Sultanates of 16th- and 17th-century central India, Local States in an Imperial World promotes the idea that some polities of the time were not aspiring to be empires. Instead of the universalist and hierarchical vision typical of the language of empire, the sultanates presented another brand of state - one that prefers negotiation, flexibility and plurality of languages, religions and cultures. Building on theories of early modernity, empire, cosmopolitanism and vernaculars, Roy Fischel considers the components that shaped state and society: people, identities and idioms. He presents a frame for understanding the Deccan Sultanates as a rare case of the early modern non-imperial state, shedding light both on the region and on the imperial world surrounding it.
Download or read book Through Your Eyes Religious Alterity and the Early Modern Western Imagination written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-09-20 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The focus of Through Your Eyes: Religious Alterity and the Early Modern Western Imagination is the (mostly Western) understanding, representation and self-critical appropriation of the "religious other" between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Mutually constitutive processes of selfing/othering are observed through the lenses of creedal Jews, a bhakti Brahmin, a widely translated Morisco historian, a collector of Western and Eastern singularia, Christian missionaries in Asia, critical converts, toleration theorists, and freethinkers: in other words, people dwelling in an 'in-between' space which undermines any binary conception of the Self and the Other. The genesis of the volume was in exchanges between eight international scholars and the two editors, intellectual historian Giovanni Tarantino and anthropologist Paola von Wyss-Giacosa, who share an interest in comparatism, debates over toleration, and history of emotions. Contributors are: Daniel Barbu, Vincent Carretta, Ananya Chakravarti, Talya Fishman, Rolando Minuti, Fernando Rodríguez Mediano, Paul Rule, Knut Martin Stünkel, Giovanni Tarantino, and Paola von Wyss-Giacosa.
Download or read book Women Wealth and the State in Early Colonial India written by Nicholas J Abbott and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2024-08-25 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few polities were more instrumental to the rise of the East India Company and the advent of British colonial rule in South Asia than the Mughal successor state of Awadh (c. 1722–1856). And few individuals influenced the making of the Awadh regime and its pivotal relationship with the Company more than the chief consorts (begams) of its ruling dynasty. Drawing on previously unexamined Persian sources, this book centres the begams of Awadh within a revised history of state-formation and conceptual change in pre- and early colonial India. In so doing, it posits the begams as essential, if contested, builders of both the Awadh regime and the Company state, and as ambivalent partners in forging evolving political economies and emerging conceptual languages of statehood and sovereignty in early colonial India.
Download or read book Empire Inside Out written by Ilanit Loewy Shacham and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Regardless of terminology, the use of padya and gadya in Telugu literary works is invariably linked to Nannaya (early to mid-11th century), traditionally considered the first poet of Telugu literature. The style that Nannaya inaugurated in his Telugu retelling of the Mahābhārata is regarded as the paradigm for later poets. His mixing of padya and gadya-an element not present in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata-became the preferred mode of poetic composition, even when translating a Sanskrit counterpart that used padya exclusively"--
Download or read book An bal Quijano written by Aníbal Quijano and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2024-03-01 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano is widely considered to be a foundational figure of the decolonial perspective grounded in three basic concepts: coloniality, coloniality of power, and the colonial matrix of power. His decolonial theorizations of these three concepts have transformed the principles and assumptions of the very idea of knowledge, impacted the social sciences and humanities, and questioned the myth of rationality in natural sciences. The essays in this volume encompass nearly thirty years of Quijano’s work, bringing them to an English-reading audience for the first time. This volume is not simply an introduction to Quijano’s work; it achieves one of his unfulfilled goals: to write a book that contains his main hypotheses, concepts, and arguments. In this regard, the collection encourages a fuller understanding and broader implementation of the analyses and concepts that he developed over the course of his long career. Moreover, it demonstrates that the tools for reading and dismantling coloniality originated outside the academy in Latin America and the former Third World.
Download or read book Modern Arab Kingship written by Adam Mestyan and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-08-08 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the “recycling” of the Ottoman Empire’s uses of genealogy and religion created new political orders in the Middle East In this groundbreaking book, Adam Mestyan argues that post-Ottoman Arab political orders were not, as many historians believe, products of European colonialism but of the process of “recycling empire.” Mestyan shows that in the post–World War I Middle East, Allied Powers officials and ex-Ottoman patricians collaborated to remake imperial institutions, recycling earlier Ottoman uses of genealogy and religion in the creation of new polities, with the exception of colonized Palestine. The polities, he contends, should be understood not in terms of colonies and nation states but as subordinated sovereign local states—localized regimes of religious, ethnic, and dynastic sources of imperial authority. Meanwhile, governance without sovereignty became the new form of Western domination. Drawing on hitherto unused Ottoman, French, Syrian, and Saudi archival sources, Mestyan explores ideas and practices of creating composite polities in the interwar Middle East and, doing so, sheds light on local agency in the making of the forgotten Kingdom of the Hijaz, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, the first Muslim republic. Mestyan considers the adjustment of imperial Islam to a world without a Muslim empire, discussing the post-Ottoman Egyptian monarchy and the intertwined making of Saudi Arabia and the State of Syria in the 1920s and 1930s. Mestyan’s innovative analysis shows how an empire-based theory of the modern political order can help refine our understanding of political dynamics throughout the twentieth century and down to the turbulent present day.
Download or read book Local Knowledge and Microidentities in the Imperial Greek World written by Tim Whitmarsh and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-22 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A reappraisal of current ideas about Greek identity under the Roman empire, first published in 2010.
Download or read book Empire of Contingency written by Jorge Flores and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2024-10-15 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the information and communication practices of the Portuguese empire in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century India Empire of Contingency explores the information and communication practices of the Portuguese empire in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century India—a period during which Portuguese imperial ambitions were struggling for survival, while the Mughal empire was at the height of its power and influence. Jorge Flores uncovers the tenuous but ingenious apparatuses of intelligence through which the Estado da Índia (the “State of the Indies,” the name given to the Portuguese political administrative unit in the region between the Cape of Good Hope and East Asia) endeavored to survive in a vast Indo-Persian world shaped by the influence and power of the Mughal empire. Detailing the complex relations that the officials of the Portuguese empire, particularly in Goa, the capital of the Estado da Índia, maintained with the Mughal empire as well as the sultanates of Ahmadnagar and Bijapur in the Deccan region—through information gathering, record-keeping, interpreting, and diplomatic correspondence—the book demonstrates how the Portuguese territories along the western coast of India were substantially incorporated into the vast Persianate cultural sphere spanning from Iran to Southeast Asia. The process of empire-building on the fringes of the Persianate world and the prolonged interaction with the Mughal empire, Ahmadnagar, and Bijapur, Flores argues, led to the irregular, non-linear, and incomplete assimilation of the Portuguese empire into Persianate India. Overturning teleological narratives that portray the workings of (European) empire as the unilateral imposition of power dynamics by a dominant, omniscient actor, Flores reveals how Portuguese imperial administrators were vulnerable participants in a network of relations involving multiple political powers—relations that required enormous bureaucratic and diplomatic effort to understand and successfully navigate. Showing how a European empire was drawn into the political practices and rituals of the Indo-Persian world, Flores decenters the lenses conventionally used to observe the Portuguese empire in Asia and helps us rethink its nature while questioning the boundaries of the Indo-Persian world.
Download or read book The Art of Cloth in Mughal India written by Sylvia Houghteling and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-29 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "When a rich man in seventeenth-century South Asia enjoyed a peaceful night's sleep, he imagined himself enveloped in a velvet sleep. In the poetic imagination of the time, the fine dew of early evening was like a thin cotton cloth from Bengal, and woolen shawls of downy pashmina sent by the Mughal emperors to their trusted noblemen approximated the soft hand of the ruler on the vassal's shoulder. Textiles in seventeenth-century South Asia represented more than cloth to their makers and users. They simulated sensory experience, from natural, environmental conditions to intimate, personal touch. The Art of Cloth in Mughal India is the first art historical account of South Asian textiles from the early modern era. Author Sylvia Houghteling resurrects a truth that seventeenth-century world citizens knew, but which has been forgotten in the modern era: South Asian cloth ranked among the highest forms of art in the global hierarchy of luxury goods, and had a major impact on culture and communication. While studies abound in economic history about the global trade in Indian textiles that flourished from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, they rarely engage with the material itself and are less concerned with the artistic-and much less the literary and social-significance of the taste for cloth. This book is richly illustrated with images of textiles, garments, and paintings that are held in little-known collections and have rarely, if ever, been published. Rather than rely solely on records of European trading companies, Houghteling draws upon poetry in local languages and integrates archival research from unpublished royal Indian inventories to tell a new history of this material culture, one with a far more balanced view of its manufacture and use, as well as its purchase and trade"--
Download or read book Cultural Anthropology written by John H. Bodley and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 2011-04-16 with total page 649 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This introductory text introduces basic concepts in cultural anthropology by comparing cultures of increasing scale and focusing on specific universal issues throughout human history. Cultural materials are presented in integrated ethnographic case studies organized by cultural and geographic areas to show how ideological, social organization, and material features fit together in specific sociocultural systems. Bodley explicitly seeks a balance between ecological-materialist and cultural-ideological explanations of sociocultural systems, while stressing the importance of individual power-seeking and human agency. Part One examines domestic-scale, autonomous tribal cultures. Part Two presents politically organized, class-based civilizations and ancient empires in the imperial world. Part Three surveys global, industrial, market-based civilizations in the contemporary commercial world. Cultural Anthropology uniquely challenges students to consider the big questions about the nature of cultural systems.
Download or read book Between Household and State written by Subah Dayal and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2024-12-24 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "For decades, scholars have examined the Mughal Empire, South Asia's largest and most powerful pre-colonial empire, to measure the greatness of its political, ideological, and cultural institutions. Between Household and State departs from dynastic narrations of the Mughal past to highlight the role of elite households and familial networks in shaping imperial power, particularly in peninsular India, the only region of the subcontinent never fully incorporated into the imperial realm. Drawing upon rare documentary and literary materials in Persian and Urdu alongside the Dutch East India Company's archives, the book takes us on a journey from military forts and regional courts in the Deccan to the weaving villages of the Coromandel Coast to examine how regional elite alliances, feuds, and material exchanges intersected with imperial institutions to create new forms of affinity, belonging, and social exclusion. Between Household and State brings attention to the importance of ghar-or home-as an analytical framework for the creation of mobile forms of sovereignty that anchored the Mughal frontier across the variable geography of peninsular India in the seventeenth century"--
Download or read book Sovereign City written by Geoffrey Parker and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title provides an examination of the rise, evolution and decline of the city-state, from ancient times to the present day.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Seven Years War written by Trevor Burnard and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 785 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This handbook contains 38 essays that provide up-to-date scholarship on all aspects of the globally important Seven Years' War (1756-1763). The volume carefully examines the three major areas of conflict in the war-Europe, South Asia, and the Americas-treating each theater as distinct from each other but often linked in ways that helped create a new geopolitics from the 1760s onward. Chapters trace the causes of the war in the interior of America; outline the triumphs of Britain and Prussia in fierce fighting across Europe; and explain how the British under the East India Company came to play an important role in South Asian politics and commerce. The handbook pays due attention to military conflict but does much more than this. It investigates social, cultural, and intellectual developments in a crucial period of reorientation during the mid-eighteenth century. The handbook is notably diverse in its authorship, with leading scholars on the Seven Years' War from Europe and South Asia as well as Britain and North America, providing perspectives from many areas outside an Anglo-American frame. It treats the Seven Years' War as a world-transformative event: important not only in its own right-in shaping commerce, politics, science, art, demography, religion, and gender during the conflict-but also central to the evolving history of South Asia, Europe, and the Americas in the second half of the eighteenth century"--
Download or read book India before Europe written by Catherine B. Asher and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-08 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Second edition of the leading textbook on India's art, architecture, literature, religions, political and economic history, c. 1200 to 1750.
Download or read book Safavid Persia in the Age of Empires written by Charles Melville and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-02-25 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the establishment of the new Safavid regime in Iran. Along with reuniting the Persian lands under one rule, the Safavids initiated the radical transformation of the religious landscape by introducing Imami Shi'ism as the official state faith and in this as in other ways, laying the foundations of Iran's modern identity. In this book, leading scholars of Iranian history, culture and politics examine the meaning of the idea of Iran in the Safavid period by examining contemporary experiences of both insiders and outsiders, asking how modern scholarship defines the distinctive features of the age. While sometimes viewed as a period of decline from the high points of classical Persian literature and the visual arts of preceding centuries, the chapters of this book demonstrate that the Safavid era was nevertheless a period of great literary and artistic activity in the realms of both secular and theological endeavour. With the establishment of comparable polities across western, southern and central Asia at broadly the same time, the book explores some of the literary and political interactions with Iran's Ottoman, Mughal and Uzbek neighbours. As the volume and frequency of European merchants and diplomats visiting Safavid Persia increased, especially in the seventeenth century, and as more Iranians recorded their own travel experiences to surrounding Muslim lands, the Safavid period is the first in which we can document and explore the contours of Iran's place in an expanding world, and gain insights into how Iranians saw themselves and others saw them.
Download or read book Body History Myth written by Anna Lise Seastrand and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024-07-16 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first major exploration of the mural tradition in early modern South India An astonishing variety of murals greet visitors to the temples and palaces of southern India. Beautiful in execution and extensive in scope, murals painted on walls and ceilings adorn the most important spaces of early modern religious and political performance. Scene by scene, histories of holy sites, portraits that incorporate historical figures into mythic landscapes, and Tamil and Telugu inscriptions that evoke the imagined topographies of devotional poetry unfold before the mobile spectator. Body, History, Myth reconceives the relationship between art and devotion in South India by describing how the extraordinary sensory experience of a viewing body in motion unfurls a sacred narrative exquisitely designed to teach, impress, and inspire. Anna Lise Seastrand offers new insights into the arts of early modern southern India, bringing to life one of the most culturally vibrant yet least understood periods in Indian art. She shows how temple visitors become active participants in the paintings through their somatic engagement with visual stories and devotional landscapes. Seastrand highlights the significance of textuality in early modern South Asia by examining the status of professional scribes and the prominence given to authorship of religious literature and art. Her insights are presented alongside new translations of the texts that accompany mural paintings. Featuring a wealth of stunning images published here for the first time, Body, History, Myth provides a multidimensional reading of temple art that fundamentally reframes the artistic, intellectual, religious, and political histories of early modern India.
