Preface

Selling Printed Cottons in Mid-Nineteenth-Century India: John Matheson of Glasgow and Scottish Turkey Red

“…Matheson's England to Delhi, which describes his first trip, gives a vivid account of India in the early 1860s, just a few years after the East India Company had ceased operations, through a journey that was largely commercial in its purpose, reflecting a wish to better know in person a country familiar 'through the medium of a close mercantile connections'. 31 The 1860s marked a high point in the Scottish Turkey red entrepreneur's optimistic engagement with the India market. John Matheson was convinced of a bright future ahead for a modernising economy, with increasingly westernised consumers rising 'above the shadows of ignorance and mysticism into the light and liberty of day' and growth in fine exports to India for firms like his own.…”

Science fiction and the medical humanities

“…Other texts have a similar, non-medical surplus of meaning. Richard Matheson's well-known The Shrinking Man (1956) presents a highly implausible biomedical novum, an accidental radiation-induced shrinking effect, and uses it for a series of defamiliarising meditations 24. These include postwar atomic anxiety and patriarchy (the male protagonist loses his patriarchal power over his family, and his sexual attractiveness to his wife, as he shrinks) or myths of childhood innocence (as the protagonist becomes smaller, and more superficially child-like, so he becomes the object of abuse by both adults and children).…”