Bengal in Global Concept History

Sartori, Andrew

doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226734866.001.0001

Cited by 165 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…Some stimulating recent interpretations maintain that that initial reform grouping was not a foundation for later liberal movements so much as a historical cul-de-sac. 190 The present account broadly supports such a conclusion. Where it differs most notably is in locating the cause of the discontinuity not in amorphous forces of 'culturalism' or 'colonial modernity', but in the outcome of a specific debate over relations between state and public.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 83%

The Crisis of Liberal Reform in India: Public opinion, pyrotechnics, and the Charter Act of 1833

Ehrlich¹

2018

Mod. Asian Stud.

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This article reveals the Charter Act of 1833 as a turning point in the history of British-Indian political thought, which foreclosed, for a generation, liberal efforts to reform Britain's avowedly despotic regime in India. Anticipating a victory in their transmarine campaign to make the state accountable to an Indian ‘public’, reformers were disillusioned to find instead that the new Act was founded on enlightened despotism. Attempting to gather popular support for the authoritarian vision of reform espoused by Thomas Babington Macaulay and the other framers of the Act, Governor-General William Bentinck organized a grand fireworks display in Calcutta. The failure of this event, however, compounded the initial backlash against the Act, widening the rift between state and ‘public’, and precipitating the latter's decline as an effective political formation.

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 83%

The Crisis of Liberal Reform in India: Public opinion, pyrotechnics, and the Charter Act of 1833

Ehrlich¹

2018

Mod. Asian Stud.

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“…In Jon Wilson's take on early colonial Bengal, a desire for progress, anxieties of distance, and cultural unfamiliarity led to "an anxious search for semantic coherence," all of which served to wrench political concepts and legal norms from their metropolitan contexts and refigure them for India (Wilson, 2008). Equally, Sartori's consideration of the "object orientation" of concepts and their "denotative capacity" (what they seek to describe and explain in a given place and time) is particularly useful when thinking about ideas as becoming meaningful in "argument" (Sartori, 2008(Sartori, , 2014. Cumulatively, the theme that emerges from these works is that the colonial world was a web of liberal commitments attuned to different circumstances.…”

Section: Indian Intellectual Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond citizen and subject: New perspectives on political thought, “tribe,” and “indirect rule” in Africa

Visana

2019

History Compass

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Despite the extensive literature on “tribe” and “indirect rule” in colonial Africa, historians have tended to confine their analyses to the economic and administrative pragmatism of empire‐builders, the domination of colonial knowledge, and the mediation of these factors by African culture‐brokers who brandished local “tradition” in order to satisfy a range of local material interests. This essay shows that these arguments replicate colonial views that bifurcated Africa into incommensurable spheres of “modern” European agency and “traditional” African response. Placing the existing scholarship of African colonial history in dialogue with Indian intellectual history and African film studies, I propose that dyadic understandings of “tribe” and “indirect‐rule” can be overcome in order to reposition Africa and its institutions at the heart of a global narrative of “modernisation.” In considering this new perspective, the essay invites students and scholars of African history and political science to recognise that—for some—“tribe” was a constituent part of a uniquely African vision of future progress rather than a premodern anachronism or a tool of Western epistemological dominance.

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“…21 This is the moment that marks, as Andrew Sartori puts it, the 'familiar dismissal of Bengali liberalism as the imitative shadow of an alien civilization'. 22 As ultimately filtered through such post-colonial authors as Franz Fanon and V. S. Naipaul, there developed among post-colonial intellectuals a kind of consensus that the imitation of Western models pointed to deep and unresolved forms of colonial trauma. 23 Within post-colonial theory, the work of Homi Bhabha has been enormously influential for its attempt to offer a way out of the dilemma of imitation by both recognizing and denying its force.…”

Section: Two Friends At a Deskmentioning

confidence: 99%

Imitation, Then and Now: On the emergence of philanthropy in early colonial Calcutta

Hatcher¹

2018

Mod. Asian Stud.

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The goal of this article is to provide conceptual and historical orientation useful for thinking about the emergence of philanthropy in modern South Asia. Conceptually, the article suggests the need to approach the expression of philanthropy in early colonial Bengal in terms of processes of imitation. To do so, we must overcome the stigma attached to the idea of imitation within both nationalist and post-colonial thought. In the particular context of early colonial Calcutta, local actors entered into intimate relationships with Europeans and these relationships provided occasions to borrow, translate, and retool a range of ideas and practices relevant to new modes of public charity. The importance of attending to historical context is suggested by reading such early colonial developments against the grain of late nineteenth-century perspectives—a time when Bengalis grew anxious about cultural imitation. Rather than deferring to these late-colonial anxieties over imitation, we need to situate them within a critically informed historical framework. To do this, the present article draws on the writings of the Brāhmo intellectual Rajnarain Bose, who pondered the relationship between an earlier colonial moment (‘then’) and his own late-colonial ‘now’. Close reading of Bose allows us to plumb the nature of late-colonial anxiety about cultural borrowing while opening up a new perspective on imitation and intimacy in early colonial Bengal that is not predicated on the teleology of the late-colonial modern.

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Bengal in Global Concept History

Cited by 165 publications

References 0 publications

The Crisis of Liberal Reform in India: Public opinion, pyrotechnics, and the Charter Act of 1833

The Crisis of Liberal Reform in India: Public opinion, pyrotechnics, and the Charter Act of 1833

Beyond citizen and subject: New perspectives on political thought, “tribe,” and “indirect rule” in Africa

Imitation, Then and Now: On the emergence of philanthropy in early colonial Calcutta

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