AbstractsDuring the nineteenth century, South Asian businessmen began to engage in modern forms of philanthropy. Focusing on the western Indian city of Surat, this essay explores the emergence of philanthropic activity within the larger “portfolios” of gift giving held by indigenous merchants from roughly 1600 to 1924. Throughout this period, Hindu and Jain commercial magnates employed gifts as means both of building up their reputations (ābrū) within high-caste society and of fostering stable ties with political overlords. Local merchants continuously adjusted their charitable choices to changes in the ideology of these overlords as they sought to obtain influence with and honors from the ruling power. Involvement in philanthropy reflected a “negotiated” accommodation to Victorian values through which elite merchants maintained a relatively secure commercial and political environment in the context of late nineteenth-century British rule. When government policies seriously threatened their ābrū during World War I, however, local traders began to view donations to the Indian National Congress as an alternative method of conserving status and credit.
This book examines the various circuits, nodes, and modes that enabled sexual scientific knowledge to spread worldwide. It shows how various actors such as Sueo Iwaya, Magnus Hirschfeld, and Swami Shivananda engaged with sexual science through their writings, as well as sexual science's relationship to modernity. The book suggests that European sexual science was constituted on the basis of conceptions of Others considered outside of “modernity” and that actors outside of Europe contributed to a globalizing sexual science through “unruly appropriations” of the field's emergent ideas. It also discusses the ways that ideas of sexual science circulated multidirectionally through travel, intellectual exchange, and internationally produced and disseminated publications. Essays written by historians, historians of science, anthropologists, and humanities scholars cover topics ranging from male homosexuality and female prostitution to the secularization of Christian marriage, popular sexology in early postwar Japan, the science of sexual difference, and female orgasm.
This book charts the history of artisan production and marketing in the Bombay Presidency from 1870 to 1960. While the textile mills of western India's biggest cities have been the subject of many rich studies, the role of artisan producers located in the region's small towns have been virtually ignored. Based upon extensive archival research as well as numerous interviews with participants in the handloom and powerloom industries, this book explores the role of weavers, merchants, consumers and laborers in the making of what the author calls 'small-town capitalism'. By focusing on the politics of negotiation and resistance in local workshops, the book challenges conventional narratives of industrial change. The book provides the first in-depth work on the origins of powerloom manufacture in South Asia. It affords unique insights into the social and economic experience of small-town artisans as well as the informal economy of late colonial and early post-independence India.
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