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The “age of revolutions” was a global era. Around the world between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, new states and empires supplanted old regimes. The implications of those large-scale political changes were evident not just across the Atlantic, but also around interregional realms like the Indian Ocean. But even as historians have of […]
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While Muslim traders from the Arabic world and Jewish traders in the Mediterranean have enjoyed a long-established reputation for business acumen, Buddhist traders maintain a rather obscure position in histories of commerce. This may be because ancient Indian Buddhist scriptures hold that trading constituted misconduct on the part of monks, and trading for profit was […]
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How did past environments, objects, and people smell? What can aromas and stenches tell us about history and culture? Scents of China takes you on a smell-walk through modern Chinese history, tracing stories about opium, dried fish, Florida water, cesspools, class enemies, and many other sweet, stinky, and unnameable odours. We might have been told […]
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Iranian literary historian Muhammad-Taqi Bahar (1885-1951) together with Pakistani political and literary figures
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In 1872, the night before a meeting about the progress of education among Indian Muslims, Nawab Mohsin ul-Mulk (1837-1907) woke up and realised that his companion, the famous Muslim reformer Syed Ahmed Khan (1817-1898), was not beside him: When I went out of the room in his search, I saw him pacing up and down […]
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Earlier this year, my first book, Sex and the Making of the British Empire, originally published in 2006 gained some attention because of Bridgerton’s second season on Netflix. My book was about women who lived in India who married, cohabited with, or were enslaved by British and European officials, East India Company soldiers, and non-official […]
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Sex, gender, and sexuality. What sense have different people, institutions, and the state made of these terms since the late nineteenth century? To the medical doctors, scientists, social reformers, and government officials of the emerging modern nation and empire of Japan (1868–1945), the distinction of sex from gender was largely meaningless. Sexuality was the natural […]
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How to view the history of India in a global perspective ? One answer is to frame it within a project of ‘provincialisation’ of Europe as advocated by Dipesh Chakrabarty. But there is an alternative possibility with Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s call for ‘connected histories’. I have explored it in ‘India and the World : A History […]
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