Re-Thinking the ‘Social’ in British Colonial and South Asian History

Bibliographic Data

ID8957282
AuthorsOsama Siddiqui (0000-0001-5093-3114, Providence College, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume68
Issue4
Pages896-917
Publication date2024-12-25
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Historical Journal (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-246X • E-ISSN: 1469-5103
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0018246x24000578
OpenAlexW4405782843
LanguageEN
References cited15

This historiographical review engages with recent works in British colonial and South Asian history that shed light on the emergence of the concept of ‘society’ or the ‘social’ in South Asia. The review explores three main areas for the study of the social concept including: scholarship on liberalism and colonial law; histories of colonial sociology and knowledge production; and materialist histories of political economy and concept formation. The review then outlines some avenues for further research, focusing particularly on questions of form, language, and translation that have largely been overlooked in existing scholarship. It suggests that while there are robust accounts of the uses of the social concept in South Asia, what is missing is a consideration of the vernacular histories of this concept, including how it came to be articulated in South Asian languages. Ultimately, the review makes the case that conceptual history must take into account both the historical transformations that produced certain concepts as well as the languages and aesthetic and documentary forms through which we come to know those concepts

Archaeology · Colonialism · Ethnology · Social history (medicine · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Medicine

Tools

Open DOIOpen Access