Samuel D Carpenter

Tag: British India

  • Notes on Colonial-Imperial knowledge formation

    A number of scholars of British India have sought to understand the ways in which British power was exercised through constructing knowledge about Indian societies, including their histories and literatures, languages and geographies. At one end of the spectrum, intellectual followers of Edward Said argue that the British imposed their own knowledge and cultural forms on…

  • From the Archives…

    My MA thesis of 2007-08 on New Zealand parliamentary debates of the 1850s-60s emphasized the way history imbued the consciousness of the Victorians. In particular, when conceptualizing the history of the indigenous people Victorian New Zealanders encountered, they placed them in their own civilizational history: as Europe’s history had once been peopled by savages and barbarians who were…

  • Reading… Thomas Babington Macaulay

    If any Briton represents the image of the statesman-scholar of the nineteenth century, it is Thomas Babington (“T B”) Macaulay. Son of the anti-slave trade campaigner, Zachery Macaulay, he was a pre-eminent man of letters of the Victorian age, a parliamentarian and orator acclaimed by many, a Cabinet minister, and for a time an administrator…

  • imperial projects

    Another couple of interesting ‘imperial projects’ currently in progress: Alan Lester is leading a project called ‘Snapshots of Empire’ based at the University of Sussex. This project will analyse in detail three separate years of correspondence (1838, 1857, 1879) coming in and going out of the Colonial Office and East India Company/ India Office to see how the empire…

  • Reading… C A Bayly

    So I’m reading Christopher Bayly at the moment. When he passed away last year he was one of the leading historians of British India, the British empire generally, and also of a new global history. Richard Drayton gave a nice write-up of Bayly’s work in his obituary in the Guardian. I’ve been reading his 1998…