Kamlesh Mohan, "Science and Technology in Colonial India"
English | ISBN: 1032364793 | 2022 | 176 pages | PDF | 2 MB
This book is a significant contribution to the socio-political history of science and technology in India, combining a wholistic perspective with a strong regional flavour.

Irene Silverblatt, "Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World"
English | 2004 | ISBN: 0822334178, 0822334062 | PDF | pages: 432 | 2.4 mb
Trying to understand how "civilized" people could embrace fascism, Hannah Arendt searched for a precedent in modern Western history. She found it in nineteenth-century colonialism, with its mix of bureaucratic rule, racial superiority, and appeals to rationality. Modern Inquisitions takes Arendt's insights into the barbaric underside of Western civilization and moves them back to the sixteenth century and seventeenth, when Spanish colonialism dominated the globe. Irene Silverblatt describes how the modern world developed in tandem with Spanish imperialism and argues that key characteristics of the modern state are evident in the workings of the Inquisition. Her analysis of the tribunal's persecution of women and men in colonial Peru illuminates modernity's intricate "dance of bureaucracy and race."

Tithi Bhattacharya, "The Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education, and the Colonial Intellectual in Bengal"
English | 2005 | ISBN: 019566910X | PDF | pages: 290 | 52.1 mb
This book is about the intellegentsia in nineteenth-century Bengal. It analyzes why-from the second half of the nineteenth century-the Hindu bhadralok in Bengal developed a specific rhetoric of culture that has continued to inform their identity to the present day.

The Komedie Stamboel: Popular Theater in Colonial Indonesia, 1891-1903 By Matthew Isaac Cohen
2006 | 496 Pages | ISBN: 0896802469 | PDF | 40 MB
Winner of the 2008 Benda Prize Originating in 1891 in the port city of Surabaya, the Komedie Stamboel, or Istanbul-style theater, toured colonial Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia by rail and steamship. The company performed musical versions of the Arabian Nights, European fairy tales and operas such as Sleeping Beauty and Aida, as well as Indian and Persian romances, Southeast Asian chronicles, true crime stories, and political allegories. The actors were primarily Eurasians, the original backers were Chinese, and audiences were made up of all races and classes. The Komedie Stamboel explores how this new hybrid theater pointed toward possibilities for the transformation of self in a colonial society and sparked debates on moral behavior and mixed-race politics. While audiences marveled at spectacles involving white-skinned actors, there were also racial frictions between actors and financiers, sexual scandals, fights among actors and patrons, bankruptcies, imprisonments, and a murder. Matthew Isaac Cohen's evocative social history situates the Komedie Stamboel in the culture of empire and in late nineteenth-century itinerant entertainment. He shows how the theater was used as a symbol of cross-ethnic integration in postcolonial Indonesia and as an emblem of Eurasian cultural accomplishment by Indische Nederlanders. A pioneering study of nineteenth-century Southeast Asian popular culture, The Komedie Stamboel gives a new picture of the region's arts and culture and explores the interplay of currents in global culture, theatrical innovation, and movement in colonial Indonesia.ABOUT THE AUTHOR---Matthew Isaac Cohen is senior lecturer in Drama and Theatre Studies at Royal Holloway University of London. His articles on Southeast Asian performance have appeared in New Theatre Quarterly, Asian Theatre Journal, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, and Archipel. As a practicing shadow puppeteer, he has performed in the United States, Europe, and Asia.

Hayden J. Bellenoit, "The Formation of the Colonial State in India: Scribes, Paper and Taxes, 1760-1860"
English | 2017 | ISBN: 0415704472 | PDF | pages: 230 | 2.1 mb
In the period between the 1770s and 1840s, through the process of colonial state formation, the early colonial state in India was able to harness and extract vast amounts of agrarian wealth in north India. However, little is known of the histories of the Indian scribes and the role they played in shaping the early patterns of British colonial rule.

The Colonial Public and the Parsi Stage: The Making of the Theatre of Empire (1853-1893) By Rashna Darius Nicholson
2021 | 345 Pages | ISBN: 303065835X | PDF | 8 MB
The Colonial Public and the Parsi Stageis the first comprehensive study of the Parsi theatre, colonial South and Southeast Asia's most influential cultural phenomenon and the precursor of the Indian cinema industry. By providing extensive, unpublished information on its first actors, audiences, production methods, and plays, this book traces how the theatre―which was one of the first in the Indian subcontinent to adopt European stagecraft―transformed into a pan-Asian entertainment industry in the second half of the nineteenth century. Nicholson sheds light on the motivations that led to the development of the popular, commercial theatre movement in Asia through three areas of investigation: the vernacular public sphere, the emergence of competing visions of nationhood, and the narratological function that women served within a continually shifting socio-political order. The book will be of interest to scholars across several disciplines, including cultural history, gender studies, Victorian studies, the sociology of religion, colonialism, and theatre.

Sanjay Seth, "Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India"
English | 2007 | ISBN: 0822341050 | PDF | pages: 277 | 2.0 mb
Subject Lessons offers a fascinating account of how western knowledge "traveled" to India, changed that which it encountered, and was itself transformed in the process. Beginning in 1835, India's British rulers funded schools and universities to disseminate modern, western knowledge in the expectation that it would gradually replace indigenous ways of knowing. From the start, western education was endowed with great significance in India, not only by the colonizers but also by the colonized, to the extent that today almost all "serious" knowledge about India-even within India-is based on western epistemologies. In Subject Lessons, Sanjay Seth's investigation into how western knowledge was received by Indians under colonial rule becomes a broader inquiry into how modern, western epistemology came to be seen not merely as one way of knowing among others but as knowledge itself.

Michelle J. Smith, "From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Literature, 1840-1940"
English | ISBN: 1487503091 | 2018 | 280 pages | PDF | 2 MB
Through a comparison of Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand texts published between 1840 and 1940, From Colonial to Modern develops a new history of colonial girlhoods revealing how girlhood in each of these emerging nations reflects a unique political, social, and cultural context.

Shadows of Empire: Colonial Discourse and Javanese Tales By Laurie J. Sears
1996 | 376 Pages | ISBN: 0822316978 | PDF | 25 MB
Shadows of Empire explores Javanese shadow theater as a staging area for negotiations between colonial power and indigenous traditions. Charting the shifting boundaries between myth and history in Javanese Mahabharata and Ramayana tales, Laurie J. Sears reveals what happens when these stories move from village performances and palace manuscripts into colonial texts and nationalist journals and, most recently, comic books and novels. Historical, anthropological, and literary in its method and insight, this work offers a dramatic reassessment of both Javanese literary/theatrical production and Dutch scholarship on Southeast Asia. Though Javanese shadow theater (wayang) has existed for hundreds of years, our knowledge of its history, performance practice, and role in Javanese society only begins with Dutch documentation and interpretation in the nineteenth century. Analyzing the Mahabharata and Ramayana tales in relation to court poetry, Islamic faith, Dutch scholarship, and nationalist journals, Sears shows how the shadow theater as we know it today must be understood as a hybrid of Javanese and Dutch ideas and interests, inseparable from a particular colonial moment. In doing so, she contributes to a re-envisioning of European histories that acknowledges the influence of Asian, African, and New World cultures on European thought-and to a rewriting of colonial and postcolonial Javanese histories that questions the boundaries and content of history and story, myth and allegory, colonialism and culture. Shadows of Empire will appeal not only to specialists in Javanese culture and historians of Indonesia, but also to a wide range of scholars in the areas of performance and literature, anthropology, Southeast Asian studies, and postcolonial studies.

Chérie N. Rivers, "To Be Nsala's Daughter: Decomposing the Colonial Gaze"
English | ISBN: 1478016450 | 2023 | 128 pages | PDF | 24 MB
In To Be Nsala's Daughter, Chérie N. Rivers shows how colonial systems of normalized violence condition the way we see and, through collaboration with contemporary Congolese artists, imagines ways we might learn to see differently. Rivers focuses on a photograph of a Congolese man, Nsala, looking at the disembodied hand and foot of his daughter, which were removed as punishment for his failure to deliver the requisite amount of rubber in King Léopold's Congo. This photograph, taken by British missionary Alice Seeley Harris, featured prominently in abolitionist campaigns to end colonial atrocities in Central Africa in the early twentieth century. But in addition to exposing the visible violence of colonialism, Rivers argues, this photograph also exposes the invisible-and continued-violence of the colonial gaze. With a poetic, personal collage of stories and images,