Communication and Colonialism in Eastern India: Bihar, 1760s–1880s
Author(s): Nitin Sinha (Author)
Publisher: Anthem Press
Publication Date: 1 Sept. 2012
Edition: Illustrated
Language: English
Print length: 310 pages
ISBN-10: 0857284487
ISBN-13: 9780857284488
Book Description
Through a regional focus on Bihar between the 1760s and 1880s, ‘Communication and Colonialism in Eastern India’ reveals the shifting and contradictory nature of the colonial state’s policies and discourses on communication. The volume explores the changing relationship between trade, transport and mobility in India, as evident in the trading and mercantile networks operating at various scales of the economy. Of crucial importance to this study are the ways in which knowledge about roads and routes was collected through practices of travel, tours, surveys, and map-making, all of which benefited the state in its attempts to structure a regime that would regulate ‘undesirable’ forms of mobility.
Editorial Reviews
Review
‘[This is] a book which is not only nuanced and convention challenging, but also successful in simultaneously navigating several strands of historical investigation. There is something in here for the historian of transport, as there is for the historian of cartography, the economic historian and the historian of print culture. [It is] likely to become important reading for scholars of colonial South Asia.’ —Amelia Bonea, ‘H-Soz-Kult’
Review
‘Dr Sinha provides a fascinating study of transportation and communication in Bihar. This book moves, and therefore moves all of us, beyond the published literature. The periodization, the 1760s to the 1880s, enables Sinha to identify better the continuities and discontinuities within the circulation of people, goods and ideas in India before and after the 1850s advent of railways.’ ―Professor Ian J. Kerr, University of Manitoba
About the Author
Nitin Sinha is a research fellow at the Zentrum Moderner Orient (Centre for Modern Oriental Studies) in Berlin. His current work focuses on the socio-historical dimensions of the River Ganga in India. He has published on issues of transport and the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857, mobility and criminality, and railway labour movements in nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial India.
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