Representing Calcutta

Representing Calcutta PDF

Author: Swati Chattopadhyay

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 9780415343596

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Exploring the politics of representation and the cultural changes that occurred in the city, this post colonial study addresses the questions of modernity and space that haunt our perception of Calcutta.

Calcutta in Colonial Transition

Calcutta in Colonial Transition PDF

Author: Ranjit Sen

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2019-03-14

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 0429576110

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This book brings home the story of how three clustered villages grew into a primate city, in which a garrison town, a port city and the capital of an empire merged into one entity—Calcutta. This and its companion volume Birth of a Colonial City examine the geopolitical factors that were significant in securing Calcutta's position in the light of growing influence of the East India Company and subsequently the British Empire. A definitive history of Calcutta in its nascent years, this book discusses the challenges of city-planning, the de-industrialization at the hands of British imperialists, the catastrophic fall of the Union Bank, the advent of British capital, and the rise of the Bengali business enterprise in the colonial era. It also underlines how Calcutta facilitated the development of a political consciousness and the pivotal political and cultural role it played when the movement for independence took hold in the country. This volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of modern South Asian history, British Studies, city and area studies.

Unfolding Spatial Movements in the Second-Hand Book Market in Kolkata

Unfolding Spatial Movements in the Second-Hand Book Market in Kolkata PDF

Author: Diti Bhattacharya

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-12-01

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1003806996

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This insightful book unfolds the boipara, exploring the acts of thinking and writing about space and place in the context of recent key conversations at the intersections of cultural geographies, mobilities, materialities and heritage studies. This book reconsiders how we can think about space, place and spatialisation using the book market as a case study. Focusing on everyday lived and imagined experiences within the space, it provides insights into the intricacies, complexities and mobilities involved in the many ways in which temporal, material, structural and sensorial experiences of spaces are inter-implicated. As expression and method, this work aims to be a writing of space (rather than a writing about space) produced through the interleafing of the author’s lived spatial experience of the boipara with the stories, experiences and memories of other regulars who have used and continue to use it, along with the non-human materialities and mobilities that characterise it. This book is essential reading for a wide international audience, particularly those interested in the evolving discussions on mobility, or writing about space and place, materiality, assemblage theory and heritage spaces in the South Asian context.

Literary Capitals in the Long Nineteenth Century

Literary Capitals in the Long Nineteenth Century PDF

Author: Arunima Bhattacharya

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-12-13

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 303113060X

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This book develops our understanding of the global literary field in the long nineteenth century by discussing nine different places outside the established metropoles. It shows how different economic, geographical and political factors combined to give each place its own distinctive literary culture and symbolic capital. Taking a geocritical approach, the book shows how its different case studies can be seen as ‘literary capitals’ in terms of their role within the wider nation, region or empire. The volume is divided into three parts. Part One discusses Kolkata, Hong Kong and Buenos Aires. Part Two considers ‘semi-peripheral’ European cities: Pest-Buda (Budapest), Helsinki and Dublin. Part Three focuses on cities within Italy: Trieste, Florence and Rome. Drawing on a wide range of literary texts and different genres, the book reads the nineteenth-century literary field as a constellation where different connections can be plotted across various points on the map at different times.

The Black Hole of Empire

The Black Hole of Empire PDF

Author: Partha Chatterjee

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2012-04-08

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13: 0691152012

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When Siraj, the ruler of Bengal, overran the British settlement of Calcutta in 1756, he allegedly jailed 146 European prisoners overnight in a cramped prison. Of the group, 123 died of suffocation. While this episode was never independently confirmed, the story of "the black hole of Calcutta" was widely circulated and seen by the British public as an atrocity committed by savage colonial subjects. The Black Hole of Empire follows the ever-changing representations of this historical event and founding myth of the British Empire in India, from the eighteenth century to the present. Partha Chatterjee explores how a supposed tragedy paved the ideological foundations for the "civilizing" force of British imperial rule and territorial control in India. Chatterjee takes a close look at the justifications of modern empire by liberal thinkers, international lawyers, and conservative traditionalists, and examines the intellectual and political responses of the colonized, including those of Bengali nationalists. The two sides of empire's entwined history are brought together in the story of the Black Hole memorial: set up in Calcutta in 1760, demolished in 1821, restored by Lord Curzon in 1902, and removed in 1940 to a neglected churchyard. Challenging conventional truisms of imperial history, nationalist scholarship, and liberal visions of globalization, Chatterjee argues that empire is a necessary and continuing part of the history of the modern state.

Cities of Empire

Cities of Empire PDF

Author: Tristram Hunt

Publisher: Metropolitan Books

Published: 2014-11-25

Total Pages: 544

ISBN-13: 0805096000

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An original history of the most enduring colonial creation, the city, explored through ten portraits of powerful urban centers the British Empire left in its wake At its peak, the British Empire was an urban civilization of epic proportions, leaving behind a network of cities which now stand as the economic and cultural powerhouses of the twenty-first century. In a series of ten vibrant urban biographies that stretch from the shores of Puritan Boston to Dublin, Hong Kong, New Delhi, Liverpool, and beyond, acclaimed historian Tristram Hunt demonstrates that urbanism is in fact the most lasting of Britain's imperial legacies. Combining historical scholarship, cultural criticism, and personal reportage, Hunt offers a new history of empire, excavated from architecture and infrastructure, from housing and hospitals, sewers and statues, prisons and palaces. Avoiding the binary verdict of empire as "good" or "bad," he traces the collaboration of cultures and traditions that produced these influential urban centers, the work of an army of administrators, officers, entrepreneurs, slaves, and renegades. In these ten cities, Hunt shows, we also see the changing faces of British colonial settlement: a haven for religious dissenters, a lucrative slave-trading post, a center of global hegemony. Lively, authoritative, and eye-opening, Cities of Empire makes a crucial new contribution to the history of colonialism.

Report

Report PDF

Author: Commonwealth Shipping Committee

Publisher:

Published: 1919

Total Pages: 992

ISBN-13:

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Hooghly

Hooghly PDF

Author: Robert Ivermee

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-12-15

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 1787385167

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The Hooghly, a distributary of the Ganges flowing south to the Bay of Bengal, is now little known outside of India. Yet for centuries it was a river of truly global significance, attracting merchants, missionaries, mercenaries, statesmen, laborers and others from Europe, Asia and beyond. Hooghly seeks to restore the waterway to the heart of global history. Focusing in turn on the role of and competition between those who struggled to control the river--the Portuguese, the Mughals, the Dutch, the French and finally the British, who built their imperial capital, Calcutta, on its banks--the author considers how the Hooghly was integrated into global networks of encounter and exchange, and the dramatic consequences that ensued. Traveling up and down the river, Robert Ivermee explores themes of enduring concern, among them the dynamics of modern capitalism and the power of large corporations; migration and human trafficking; the role of new technologies in revolutionizing social relations; and the human impact on the natural world. The Hooghly's global history, he concludes, may offer lessons for India as it emerges as a world superpower.