The Limits of British Colonial Control in South Asia: Spaces of Disorder in the Indian Ocean Region

by Tambe; Ashwini

• ISBN13: 9780415452571
• ISBN10: 0415452570
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781134055265
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-10-17
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

This book assesses British colonialism in South Asia in a transnational light, with the Indian Ocean region as its ambit, and with a focus on a??subalterna?? groups and actors. It breaks new ground by combining new strands of research on colonial history. Thinking about colonialism in dynamic terms, the book focuses on the movement of people of the lower orders that imperial ventures generated. Challenging the assumed stability of colonial rule, the social spaces featured are those that threatened the racial, class and moral order instituted by British colonial states. By elaborating on the colonial state's strategies to control perceived 'disorder' and the modes of resistance and subversion that subaltern subjects used to challenge state control, a picture of British Empire as an ultimately precarious, shifting and unruly formation is presented, which is quite distinct from its self-projected image as an orderly entity. Thoroughly researched and innovative in its approach, thisbook will be a valuable resource for scholars of Asian, British imperial/colonial, transnational and international history.

Table of Contents

List of contributors	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Subaltern mobility and the problem of control and containment	p. 11
Networks of subordination - networks of the subordinated: The ordered spaces of South Asian maritime labour in an age of imperialism (c. 1890-1947)	p. 13
Passport, ticket, and india-rubber stamp: 'The problem of the pauper pilgrim' in colonial India c. 1882-1925	p. 49
Do not destroy our honour: Wartime propaganda directed at East African soldiers in Ceylon (1943-44)	p. 84
Subalternity, race and the transgression of moral boundaries	p. 103
Discourses of exclusion and the 'convict stain' in the Indian Ocean (c. 1800-1850)	p. 105
Flotsam and jetsam of the Empire?: European seamen and spaces of disease and disorder in mid-nineteenth century Calcutta	p. 121
'Degenerate whites' and their spaces of disorder: Disciplining racial and class ambiguities in colonial Calcutta (c. 1880-1930)	p. 155
Hierarchies of subalternity: Managed stratification in Bombay's brothels, 1914-1930	p. 192
Index	p. 208
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