David Washbrook
Biographic Data
| ID | 290753 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David Washbrook |
| GIVEN NAMES | David |
| FAMILY NAME | Washbrook |
| SIGNATURE | WASHBROOK D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Warwick |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 46 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 383 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 44 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1973 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World
After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World - 1
Forms of citizenship in pre-modern South India
Citizenship has generally been associated with institutions located firmly in the political history of ‘the West’. The state and governance in Asia, by contrast, are taken to have been dominated by ‘Oriental’ despotism and/or theocracy. As a result, citizenship in modern Asia may be alien, artificial and weakly rooted. Focusing closely on southern and western India, this paper challenges this perspective. Its argument centres on the existence fro…
The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth, by Dipesh Chakrabarty
In his celebrated Provincializing Europe (2000), Dipesh Chakrabarty drew attention away from the universalising role of Enlightenment thought in the making of modernity and towards the multiple parochialisms that attended its engagement with ‘other’ cultures across the globe. Here, he further advances that agenda by exploring debates about the nature and purposes of ‘history’ in India from the turn of the twentieth century. His focus is on the to…
Introduction: Institutions and economic development in South Asia
The 'weak' and 'flawed' nature of South Asian institutions has become axiomatic in development discourse, with the persistence of this view outweighed only by its lack of concreteness. The fascination with institutions is noteworthy precisely because the most fundamental questions about them are still under debate: there is little agreement on the definition of institutions beyond generic statements, let alone an established consensus on which in…
The World of the Indian Ocean
South Asian history and scandal in the Archive: Hindu law
Scanning the South Asia Archive, it is hard not to be impressed by the rich possibilities of investigation and discovery. Part of the Archive deals with how India’s British rulers attempted to govern, and thus to shape, its society through the passage towards modernity. These days we are rightly suspicious that their interests lay more in their own modernity than that of their colonial ‘subjects’ and that their rule was marked more by authoritari…
Religious Cultures in Early Modern India: New Perspectives
Routledge Handbook of the South Asian Diaspora
Envisioning the social order in a southern port city: The Tamil diary of Ananda Ranga Pillai
The Tamil ‘diary’ left by Ananda Ranga Pillai (1709–61), agent to the French Governor of Pondicherry, Jean Baptiste Dupleix, has attracted admiration and puzzlement in equal measure. Why, much before the forces of colonialism had made their full cultural impact, should a Tamil merchant with few intellectual pretensions seek to keep a ‘diary’ – that core instrument of ‘Western’ subjectivity? By most standards, it is not really a ‘diary’ at all. It…
Celestial India: Madame Blavatsky and the Birth of the Indian Nation, by Isaac Lubelsky
Regarded, in these post-colonial times, with scarcely disguised condescension, Theosophy in its heyday was a movement seeking radical reappraisal of the imperial relationship with India and of the ‘civilising mission’. Born out of the Orientalist discovery of Sanskrit culture in the early nineteenth century, it was nurtured in the mid-century on emergent Aryan race theory and the turn towards spiritualism; and it celebrated its maturity, at the t…
Religious cultures in an imperial landscape
The Textile Industry And The Economy Of South India, 1500–1800
Founded in 1683 in Leiden, the Netherlands, Brill is a leading international academic publisher in the Humanities, Social Sciences, International Law, and Biology. With offices in the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, the USA and Asia, Brill today publishes more than 360 journals and 2,000 new books and reference works each year as well as a large number of databases and primary source research collections.
Avatars of Identity
India was never a colony of ‘settlement’ for the British and whatever communities they formed there were always marked by transience. Nonetheless, over two hundred and fifty years, they interacted with Indian culture in a variety of ways and underwent a number of different social experiences. This chapter explores their diversity of experience in different places at different times, seeking to escape the stereotypes usually associated with ‘the R…
The Twilight of the East India Company: The Evolution of Anglo-Asian Commerce and Politics 1790–1860
The Twilight of the East India Company: The Evolution of Anglo-Asian Commerce and Politics 1790–1860." The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 38(2), pp. 339–340
The Maratha Brahmin model in south India: An afterword
Many of the social groups who acquired scribal skills in the early modern period went on to acquire western education in the colonial period, and to lead the growth of the professions and the development of science and technology even into the postcolonial era. Yet, especially for Brahmins, the transition in both the early modern and modern epochs was never easy and raised awkward questions about the relationship between their ‘religious’ and ‘se…
The Textile Industry and the Economy of South India, 1500–1800
Between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, India's textile industry made it one of the key centres of the then-emerging world economy. For most of the early modern period, southern India lay outside the boundaries of the Mughal Empire. This makes its experience somewhat atypical of the rest of India - but, in several respects, perhaps usefully so. The shift towards new coastal settlements and forms of organization also raised other issue…
Merchants, Markets, and Commerce in Early Modern South India
Classically, economic theory and anthropology have been concerned with the dichotomy between “non-market” and “market” systems of exchange, and with the transition from the former to the latter. From this perspective, the two are necessarily conceived as juxtapositional and antithetical. However, for long periods of history, non-market and market systems of exchange subsisted side-by-side, creating a “hybrid” institutional environment. In the con…
Intimations of modernity in South India
Modernity in South India today expresses itself in many distinctive and paradoxical ways. In part, this may be explained by a colonial history that explicitly attempted to draw on tradition even while pursuing innovation. However, in greater part, it may derive from a pre-colonial past of multiculturalism, economic mobility and intense social competition. South Indian society in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries possessed many features of an …
Reconfiguring Indian History
THE three books reviewed here might be seen to come from three of the four disciplinary corners currently converging on the history of British imperialism in India. Huw Bowen's The Business of Empire represents a careful and empirically-based study of the business of the English East India Company in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, reflecting the perspectives of economic history. Michael Dodson's Orientalism, Empire and Nation…
India in the early modern world economy: Modes of production, reproduction and exchange
India played a leading role in the growth of the early modern world economy. Yet its historiography has been dominated by forebodings of the colonial conquest and decline, which were to overtake it at the end of the eighteenth century. This essay seeks to explore the strengths rather than weaknesses of the Indian economy between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries when the goods which it produced were in heavy demand in Asia, Africa, Europe an…
Rajnarayan Chandavarkar (1953-2006)
The death of Raj Chandavarkar at a preposterously early age robs social history of one of its most distinctive, and enigmatic, voices. During his all-too-brief career, Raj's writings made a major impact on how the history of his native India should be understood, drawing attention to previously-neglected areas of experience among industrial workers, urban dwellers, ‘criminal’ classes, the sick and the poor. But his work transcended its immediate …
South India 1770-1840: The Colonial Transition
Readers in the historiography of colonial south India have every reason to feel puzzled by the answers available to even the most straightforward of questions. Was the colonial conquest achieved through the imposition of 'superior' European arms, technology and ideology or was it more in the nature of an internal subversion of the pre-existing Indian state system? Did British rule fundamentally alter the structures of South Indian society or did …
In Memory of Ashin Das Gupta (1932-1998)
Brill profit levels and organic growth in line with expectations, integration V&R according to plan and continuation of eBusiness growth Update on year-to-date performance During the third quarter Brill's eBusiness continued its strong growth, driven by eBooks and digital primary sources.This growth compensated for the ongoing decline in print books.YTD Journal sales declined mainly due to delayed invoicing, which is expected to be recovered in Q…
Orients and Occidents: Colonial Discourse Theory and the Historiography of the British Empire
A striking feature of historical writings on the British Empire over the last decade has been the influence of critical theories of ‘colonial discourse’. Discourse criticism percolated steadily into the historiography of imperialism over a considerable period through interdisciplinary contacts with anthropology, which responded to it first. Colonial discourse critique certainly inspired a major paradigm-shift in the historiography of imperialism …
And Having Melted Into Thin Air, Then Rains Down Again
Law, State and Agrarian Society in Colonial India
Perhaps the most intransigent problem in the recent history of Indian society remains an adequate understanding of the processes of social change which took place under colonialism. As the continunig controversies within, as much as between, the traditions of modernization theory, Marxism, and the underdevelopment theory make plain, the Indian historical record is peculiarly difficult to grasp with conventional sociological concepts. In the study…
Progress and Problems: South Asian Economic and Social History c.1720-1860
Over the last fifteen to twenty years, interest in the history of early modern and modern South Asia has grown enormously and has engaged the attention of an increasingly international audience. Whereas, at the end of the 1960s, research in the subject was largely confined to universities in South Asia itself and the rest of the British Commonwealth, today a variety of projects, conferences and regular workshops link together scholars from South …
From Comparative Sociology to Global History: Britain and India in the Pre-History of Modernity
The concept of Modernity is presently very problematic in the social sciences. Included in those problems is a tendency to hypostasise ‘the West’ as possessed of an originary and authentic culture and history, which distinguished it absolutely from all Other and Traditional cultures and histories. These distinctive qualities laid a unique pathway to Modernity, which subsequently became ‘universally’ available to the rest of the world. This paper …
After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World
Over the last decade, studies of 'third world' histories and cultures have come to draw to a very considerable extent upon the theoretical perspectives provided by poststructuralism and postmodernism. With the publication in 1978 of Edward Said's work,Orientalism, these perspectives-now fused and extended into a distinctive amalgam of cultural critique, Foucauldian approaches to power, engaged 'politics of difference,' and postmodernist emphases …
South India 1770-1840: The Colonial Transition
Readers in the historiography of colonial south India have every reason to feel puzzled by the answers available to even the most straightforward of questions. Was the colonial conquest achieved through the imposition of 'superior' European arms, technology and ideology or was it more in the nature of an internal subversion of the pre-existing Indian state system? Did British rule fundamentally alter the structures of South Indian society or did …
Country Politics: Madras 1880 to 1930
The period from the 1880s to the 1930s was one of major change in the political organization of India. Indians joined the British in the highest offices of state; government greatly increased its activity through legislation and through the trebling of taxation; elective institutions and legislatures steadily replaced the discretionary rule of bureaucrats; a nationalist movement of great size and force appeared; the means of communication-through…
The Commercialization of Agriculture in Colonial India: Production, Subsistence and Reproduction in the 'Dry South', c. 1870-1930
Although it would now seem established beyond question that agriculture in most parts of India had been exposed to commercial influences from medieval times, there can be little doubt that a variety of developments from the second half of the nineteenth century greatly strengthened those influences. Railways and road transport made possible a huge expansion in cash cropping, for national and international markets, and production regimes across th…
South Asia, the World System, and World Capitalism
The challenge of Immanuel Wallerstein-to reconceive the history of South Asia since 1750 as part of the development of a capitalist world system-has yet to elicit an adequate response from South Asia's historians. While a few social scientists interested in the past have sought to apply his model, the majority of historians have either gone no further than to acknowledge the importance of bilateral relations with imperial Britain in the construct…
India in the early modern world economy: Modes of production, reproduction and exchange
India played a leading role in the growth of the early modern world economy. Yet its historiography has been dominated by forebodings of the colonial conquest and decline, which were to overtake it at the end of the eighteenth century. This essay seeks to explore the strengths rather than weaknesses of the Indian economy between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries when the goods which it produced were in heavy demand in Asia, Africa, Europe an…
Histories in Transition: Approaches to the Study of Colonialism and Culture in India
Histories in Transition: Approaches to the Study of Colonialism and Culture in India Get access Rosalind O'Hanlon, Rosalind O'Hanlon Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar David Washbrook David Washbrook Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar History Workshop Journal, Volume 32, Issue 1, AUTUMN 1991, Pages 110–127, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/32.1.110 Published: 01 October 1991
The Maratha Brahmin model in south India: An afterword
Many of the social groups who acquired scribal skills in the early modern period went on to acquire western education in the colonial period, and to lead the growth of the professions and the development of science and technology even into the postcolonial era. Yet, especially for Brahmins, the transition in both the early modern and modern epochs was never easy and raised awkward questions about the relationship between their ‘religious’ and ‘se…
The Global History of “Modernity” — A Response to a Reply
Before embarking on the unusual step of replying to what was, itself, an invited response, let me begin by thanking Peter van der Veer for considering the essays on Modernity and Its
Economic Depression and the Making of 'Traditional' Society in Colonial India 1820-1855
Intimations of modernity in South India
Modernity in South India today expresses itself in many distinctive and paradoxical ways. In part, this may be explained by a colonial history that explicitly attempted to draw on tradition even while pursuing innovation. However, in greater part, it may derive from a pre-colonial past of multiculturalism, economic mobility and intense social competition. South Indian society in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries possessed many features of an …
And Having Melted Into Thin Air, Then Rains Down Again
Forms of citizenship in pre-modern South India
Citizenship has generally been associated with institutions located firmly in the political history of ‘the West’. The state and governance in Asia, by contrast, are taken to have been dominated by ‘Oriental’ despotism and/or theocracy. As a result, citizenship in modern Asia may be alien, artificial and weakly rooted. Focusing closely on southern and western India, this paper challenges this perspective. Its argument centres on the existence fro…
Envisioning the social order in a southern port city: The Tamil diary of Ananda Ranga Pillai
The Tamil ‘diary’ left by Ananda Ranga Pillai (1709–61), agent to the French Governor of Pondicherry, Jean Baptiste Dupleix, has attracted admiration and puzzlement in equal measure. Why, much before the forces of colonialism had made their full cultural impact, should a Tamil merchant with few intellectual pretensions seek to keep a ‘diary’ – that core instrument of ‘Western’ subjectivity? By most standards, it is not really a ‘diary’ at all. It…
Religious cultures in an imperial landscape
The Twilight of the East India Company: The Evolution of Anglo-Asian Commerce and Politics 1790–1860
The Twilight of the East India Company: The Evolution of Anglo-Asian Commerce and Politics 1790–1860." The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 38(2), pp. 339–340
Merchants, Markets, and Commerce in Early Modern South India
Classically, economic theory and anthropology have been concerned with the dichotomy between “non-market” and “market” systems of exchange, and with the transition from the former to the latter. From this perspective, the two are necessarily conceived as juxtapositional and antithetical. However, for long periods of history, non-market and market systems of exchange subsisted side-by-side, creating a “hybrid” institutional environment. In the con…
Social History of an Indian Caste. The Kayasths of Hyderabad
Country Politics: Madras 1880 to 1930
The period from the 1880s to the 1930s was one of major change in the political organization of India. Indians joined the British in the highest offices of state; government greatly increased its activity through legislation and through the trebling of taxation; elective institutions and legislatures steadily replaced the discretionary rule of bureaucrats; a nationalist movement of great size and force appeared; the means of communication-through…
Bengall: The Nationalist Movement, 1876 to 1940
The Emergence of Provincial Politics: The Madras Presidency 1870–1920
This book examines an important period of transition in the political structure of South India. The first three-quarters of a century of British rule, down to the 1870s, had effectively torn apart and fragmented the political institutions of the South, and had left a highly parochial political society in which loyalties seldom extended beyond face-to-face relationships and power was extremely localized. This lack of significant supra-local politi…
Needed: Political Economy of British South India
Social History of an Indian Caste. The Kayasths of Hyderabad
Agriculture and Social Structure in Tamil Nadu
Law, State and Agrarian Society in Colonial India
Perhaps the most intransigent problem in the recent history of Indian society remains an adequate understanding of the processes of social change which took place under colonialism. As the continunig controversies within, as much as between, the traditions of modernization theory, Marxism, and the underdevelopment theory make plain, the Indian historical record is peculiarly difficult to grasp with conventional sociological concepts. In the study…
Economy and Society: Essays in Indian Economic and Social History
The Punjab Peasant in Prosperity and Debt
Caste. The Emergence of the South Asian Social System
Preface Introduction, 1993 An Argument for Eclecticism Intimations of Caste Divine Plan or Racial Antipathy? The 'Occupation' Hypothesis & Some Other Dubious Proposals The Units of the Caste System The Economy of Caste From Clan to Caste The Emergence of the Caste System in South Asia Conclusions & Final Thoughts Bibliography Index
Ethnicity and Racialism in Colonial Indian Society
Rural Society in Southeast India
Perspectives in Social Sciences 2. Three Studies on the Agrarian Structure in Bengal, 1850-1947
Progress and Problems: South Asian Economic and Social History c.1720-1860
Over the last fifteen to twenty years, interest in the history of early modern and modern South Asia has grown enormously and has engaged the attention of an increasingly international audience. Whereas, at the end of the 1960s, research in the subject was largely confined to universities in South Asia itself and the rest of the British Commonwealth, today a variety of projects, conferences and regular workshops link together scholars from South …
South Asia, the World System, and World Capitalism
The challenge of Immanuel Wallerstein-to reconceive the history of South Asia since 1750 as part of the development of a capitalist world system-has yet to elicit an adequate response from South Asia's historians. While a few social scientists interested in the past have sought to apply his model, the majority of historians have either gone no further than to acknowledge the importance of bilateral relations with imperial Britain in the construct…
Histories in Transition: Approaches to the Study of Colonialism and Culture in India
Histories in Transition: Approaches to the Study of Colonialism and Culture in India Get access Rosalind O'Hanlon, Rosalind O'Hanlon Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar David Washbrook David Washbrook Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar History Workshop Journal, Volume 32, Issue 1, AUTUMN 1991, Pages 110–127, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/32.1.110 Published: 01 October 1991
After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World
Over the last decade, studies of 'third world' histories and cultures have come to draw to a very considerable extent upon the theoretical perspectives provided by poststructuralism and postmodernism. With the publication in 1978 of Edward Said's work,Orientalism, these perspectives-now fused and extended into a distinctive amalgam of cultural critique, Foucauldian approaches to power, engaged 'politics of difference,' and postmodernist emphases …
Economic Depression and the Making of 'Traditional' Society in Colonial India 1820-1855
The Commercialization of Agriculture in Colonial India: Production, Subsistence and Reproduction in the 'Dry South', c. 1870-1930
Although it would now seem established beyond question that agriculture in most parts of India had been exposed to commercial influences from medieval times, there can be little doubt that a variety of developments from the second half of the nineteenth century greatly strengthened those influences. Railways and road transport made possible a huge expansion in cash cropping, for national and international markets, and production regimes across th…
From Comparative Sociology to Global History: Britain and India in the Pre-History of Modernity
The concept of Modernity is presently very problematic in the social sciences. Included in those problems is a tendency to hypostasise ‘the West’ as possessed of an originary and authentic culture and history, which distinguished it absolutely from all Other and Traditional cultures and histories. These distinctive qualities laid a unique pathway to Modernity, which subsequently became ‘universally’ available to the rest of the world. This paper …
The Global History of “Modernity” — A Response to a Reply
Before embarking on the unusual step of replying to what was, itself, an invited response, let me begin by thanking Peter van der Veer for considering the essays on Modernity and Its
Orients and Occidents: Colonial Discourse Theory and the Historiography of the British Empire
A striking feature of historical writings on the British Empire over the last decade has been the influence of critical theories of ‘colonial discourse’. Discourse criticism percolated steadily into the historiography of imperialism over a considerable period through interdisciplinary contacts with anthropology, which responded to it first. Colonial discourse critique certainly inspired a major paradigm-shift in the historiography of imperialism …
And Having Melted Into Thin Air, Then Rains Down Again
In Memory of Ashin Das Gupta (1932-1998)
Brill profit levels and organic growth in line with expectations, integration V&R according to plan and continuation of eBusiness growth Update on year-to-date performance During the third quarter Brill's eBusiness continued its strong growth, driven by eBooks and digital primary sources.This growth compensated for the ongoing decline in print books.YTD Journal sales declined mainly due to delayed invoicing, which is expected to be recovered in Q…
South India 1770-1840: The Colonial Transition
Readers in the historiography of colonial south India have every reason to feel puzzled by the answers available to even the most straightforward of questions. Was the colonial conquest achieved through the imposition of 'superior' European arms, technology and ideology or was it more in the nature of an internal subversion of the pre-existing Indian state system? Did British rule fundamentally alter the structures of South Indian society or did …
Political science (35 works) · History (31 works) · Sociology (26 works) · Law (25 works) · Politics (19 works) · Ancient history (17 works) · Geography (16 works) · History (16 works) · Archaeology (15 works) · Colonialism (15 works)