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ISSN 1749-8155

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Review Date: 
19 Jan 2017

Ritika Prasad’s volume Tracks of Change: Railways and Everyday Life in Colonial India is a refreshingly new addition to the historiography of colonial Indian railways. It is indeed, as the author claims in the introduction, a story of ‘how railway travel, technology and infrastructure became palpably present in the everyday lives of Indians’ (p. 2).

Review Date: 
12 Jan 2017

The Indo-Persian state secretary has occupied center stage in the emerging discourse on bureaucracy, administration and the political formation of the Mughal state. The status and role of the munshī (the Indo-Persian state secretary) within the Mughal bureaucratic structure in 17th and 18th century have formed the basis of recent historical analysis.

Review Date: 
5 Jan 2017

Crossing the Bay of Bengal, came out at a time when I had just begun to explore another history of the Bay through my research into the experiences of Bengali refugees who were rehabilitated in the Andaman Islands in the years between 1949 and 1971.(1) Hounded by the violence and brutality of the post -partition riots that ravaged the deltaic

Review Date: 
8 Dec 2016

Knowledge is power. Over the last three decades this old aphorism of political philosophy has been central to the study of colonialism in history, anthropology, and literary and cultural post-colonial studies. Revised and re-launched in social theory by Michel Foucault, the theme gained momentum after the publication of Edward Said’s highly influential book, Orientalism, in 1978.

Review Date: 
27 Oct 2016

The history of narcotics in Asia in the last century and a half has been the subject of considerable controversy and significant revision over the last 20 years or so.

Review Date: 
13 Oct 2016

Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the emergence of an independent Russia, much scholarship, both in Russia and the West, has been concerned with the pre-revolutionary monarchist and nationalist parties which had attracted relatively little attention earlier.

Review Date: 
21 Jul 2016

Missionaries are no strangers to students and researchers of the British Empire. The hackneyed image of the rough-hewn Anglican vicar preaching salvation, Christ, and colonialism to legions of natives is one of the enduring archetypes of British colonialism. This image, like so many similar ones, is not without basis in historical fact.

Review Date: 
16 Jun 2016

In this engaging new book, Thomas Marsden examines the repressive campaign against the Russian Old Believers [staroobriadtsy] launched by the conservative Minister of Internal Affairs Dmitrii Gavrilovich Bibikov (1792–1870) in 1853, just as Nicholas I’s reign (1825–55) was drawing to a close.

Review Date: 
10 Dec 2015

Bangladesh today is the only nation-state in the Indian subcontinent with levels of ethnic homogeneity similar to Western or Central Europe.

Review Date: 
15 Oct 2015

In a review in this very forum in 2009 Clare Anderson praised a shift in Indian Ocean studies.

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