This dissertation analyses autobiographical writings by twelve British women who resided in India during the 1857 Mutiny: Katherine Bartrum, Charlotte Canning, Adelaide Case, Ruth Coopland, Caroline Dickson, Frances Duberly, Maria Germon, Georgina Harris, Julia Inglis, Matilda Ouvry, Georgina Paget and Harriet Tytler. The study contends that through exposure to travel, settlement and war, the writers use diaries, journals, letters and memoirs as a framework to construct (con)textual identities: textual personas that are strongly marked by context. By scrutinising two elements: self and place, the discussion determines that voyages, relocation and war induce a textual restructuring of the self that reflects a conflict between remaining womanly whilst simultaneously appearing new and exceptional. By denying the weaker parts of female identity, elevating the status of existing female functions and assuming unwomanly roles the writers challenge the boundaries of mid-Victorian femininity. Chapter One examines the origins of the writings and interrogates the relationship between the sea-voyage and identity, asserting that travel triggers the commencement of new personas. Chapter Two discusses settlement in India, revealing that physical displacement evokes a modification of gendered and national identity. Chapter Three argues that the beginning of war generates paradoxical portrayals of the self, from fearful victim to heroic participant. Chapter Four determines that the main months of the Mutiny prompt the ultimate textual collapse of conventional womanly functions, through the advent of masculine and militaristic personalities. Chapter five examines the aftermath of the rebellion. It contends that post-war personas reveal a multitude of anxieties and that publication provides one final challenging context. Ultimately, the dissertation contends that travel, India and the Mutiny provide new contexts for twelve women to interrogate the parameters of feminine identity in autobiographical personas that as a result of their transient nature are (con)textual identities.

The thesis offers a social history of opium in colonial Assam by tracing the evolution of representations, perceptions and ideological positions on opium from local, national and transnational perspectives which enables a new mode of reading the province’s specific encounter with colonialism and nationalism. It studies Assam’s history through the prism of opium, particularly the interplay between state and society during the period 1828–1947, and focusses on three groups—addicts, peddlers and reformers—whose interaction defined the terrain of the opium question in order to challenge the economic and nationalist bias in the historiography. It interprets opium as a cultural commodity and social practice and reorients the framework of opium in India from export trade to domestic consumption, using opium addiction in Assam and the global prohibition campaign as the vantage point to explore the interplay between colonial policy, local dissent, nationalism and transnational factors in order to understand the role that opium played in shaping social, cultural and political discourses. The thesis highlights that the opium discourse epitomised the juncture where local phenomenon, national processes and transnational developments overlapped and produced a complex narrative of the intersection of notions of indolence, improvement and industry with modernities, resistance and localisms. As a social biography of opium in colonial Assam, the thesis addresses deficiencies in our understanding of opium in India as well as the wider historiography of opium and enables modes of interpreting Assam’s unique encounter with colonialism and nationalism while also providing a framework to understand the influence of transnational factors in determining local facts. The thesis signals the centrality of transnational perspectives to drug history and is, therefore, both an attempt at recovery of local perspectives and regional specificities in the context of Assam as well as the insertion of locality into the global history of opium.

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Bengal raw silk was never renowned for its high quality, yet it attracted the interest of the European trading companies from the seventeenth century. This thesis explores the English East India Company’s silk manufacturing activities in Bengal and the Company’s trade in Bengal raw silk in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. The Company’s interest in Bengal raw silk was driven both by economic and political factors – profit maximization and mercantilist ideas about governance. The English East India Company considered Bengal raw silk to be an item with potential high returns as the British silk weaving industry required supplies of raw material unavailable domestically. However, the quality of the Bengal raw silk was low and it could not be easily used in British weaving. Britain thus relied on the importation of raw silk from Italy, Turkey and the Mediterranean region. The English East India Company saw an opportunity to replace these supplies with silk imported from Bengal. In order to improve the quality of the raw silk produced in Bengal, the Company decided to adopt the Piedmontese system of silk reeling – the most advanced reeling system in Europe. The thesis shows that this new system of reeling was profitable. Yet, the quality of the Bengal raw silk did not improve as much as expected: a large part of the silk produced was of substandard quality. My thesis argues that the primary reason why substandard raw silk was produced was the inadequate institutional framework of production which facilitated principal-agent problems.

This research examines the emergence of terrorism as a legal and political category in late colonial India from 1897 to 1946. Chapter 1 traces debates surrounding laws of sedition from the 19th century and follows these laws into the early twentieth century, where they come to be viewed as increasingly inadequate in dealing with the unprecedented challenge presented to the colonial regime by secret societies using bomb assassinations against the government. Chapter 2 then examines how these discussions change in the context of the First World War, when a language of war and concerns regarding third party German involvement provide the opportunity for the imperial government to strengthen its emergency laws by legislating against 'conspiracy'. Chapter 3 demonstrates how, following the end of the war, conspiracy became itself viewed as an inadequate term and officials made a conscious decision to present revolutionaries under the label of 'terrorism' in subsequent speeches. This continued into the early 1930s, where laws in India began to target terrorism as a discrete category of crime, in legislation such as the Suppression of Terrorism Outrages Act of 1932. Chapter 4 situates this process within the context of the international system of the interwar period, first exploring India's under-studied relationship with the League of Nations and then indicating how this relationship became a point of critique for those labelled by the government as terrorists, particularly the Bengali revolutionary Rash Behari Bose. Chapter 5 shows how the discussions surrounding the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Terrorism in 1937, the world's first international law to target terrorism as a discrete category of crime, reflected many of the concerns that animated discussions in India. The chapter also examines India's role in the Convention, as the only member-state of the League to ultimately ratify the treaty.

This is a study of that system of Home Government of India which came into existence with Pitt's India Act in 1784 and lasted with few material alterations till 1858. The striking fact about that system was the setting up of a 'dyarchy', that is to say, the establishment of two bodies with overlapping jurisdiction. How it worked in practice, over what issues the two bodies came into conflict, and by what methods open friction between the two was, as a rule, avoided is the aim of this Thesis to show. It is clear that the subject is fascinating as well as of some importance. Hitherto the relations between the Directors and the Board of Control have not received adequate attention. The subject is one which lies mainly outside the domain of regular Indian History. Such account of their relationship as is given by Mill and Kaye hardly does justice to the Board of Control, while Auber, who scrupulously refrains from taking sides, is no more than a dull chronicler. Among the modern writers who have worked on parts of the subject mention must be made of Sir William Foster, the late Lord Curzon, and Mr. P.E. Roberts. It is hoped that the survey presented in these pages fills a long-felt gap. That it is complete cannot, owing to insufficiency of material, and the limitations of time and capacity, be pretended. The "Melville Papers" which were expected to shed considerable light on the subject have been scattered in various hands. In reply to my enquiry, the National Library of Scotland wrote that they had obtained some fresh material, but that it would take about six months before it was made accesible to readers. This was in May. Subsequently I received another letter saying that the material was ready for inspection, but it did not seem to promise much information on the subject. A visit to Mr. Francis Edwards, 83, High Street, Marylebone, who kindly placed at my disposal all the MSS. still in his possession proved equally fruitless. Nevertheless the MSS. at the India Office Library, the Parliamentary Papers, and the Papers printed for the use of the Proprietors have been freely consulted. As the issues over which the Board and the Court came into conflict had their roots in many cases in past history, I have devoted some space to discussing the initial position. It would thus be found that each chapter is something more than a mere narrative of controversies. With regard to the general plan of the Thesis, I might mention that the first chapter recapitulates the events leading up to the Act of 1784, and the second chapter which discusses the general features of the system is designed to serve as 'an introduction. Each subsequent chapter is then devoted to a case or a group of cases illustrating the relationship of the Board and the Court of Directors. The series terminate with the case of Major Hart, a landmark in their relations. My thanks are due to my professor, John Coatman, Esq., C.I.E., for valuable guidance and constant encouragement, and Sir William Foster for occasional advice, as also to the officials of the British Museum and the India Office Library.

This project started as an attempt to understand rank-and-file resistance within the colonial Indian army. My reasons for doing so were quite simple. Colonial Indian soldiers were situated in the divide between the colonizers and the colonized. As a result, they rarely entered colonialist narratives written by and of the British officer or nationalist accounts of the colonial military. The writers of contemporary post-colonial histories have been content to maintain this lacuna, partly because colonial soldiers are seen as not sufficiently ‘subaltern’ to be the subjects of their studies. The more I investigated the matter, the more I realized how important it was to move beyond ideas of resistance and collaboration. If sipahis (or sepoys) were between the two poles of colonizer and colonized, so their day-to-day existence fell between notions of resistance or collaboration. The problem I still had was finding a means by which I could recover the voice of the colonial soldier. Locating the testimony of Indian sipahis was not as difficult as I first feared. Thousands of censored 'Indian Mails' from the two World Wars were stored by the India Office at Whitehall and are now within the archived records of the British Library. A similar number of interrogation reports of Indian military personnel who defected to the Indian National Army during the Second World War, and subsequently fought for the independence of India, have recently been declassified by the Indian Ministry of Defence and handed to the National Archives of India. Finally, depositions given by soldiers during courts martial in the early part of the twentieth century have survived in several archives. But none of these sources offered a holistic glimpse of what soldiers thought and felt. The presence of the censor, interrogator and the courtroom was literally written across the page and conditioned the voice of the sipahi contained therein. The solution I have adopted in this thesis is to treat the heteroglot nature of these forms of testimony as reflective of Indian soldiers' own heteroglossia. Even though the spaces in which soldiers could speak were compromised, they could nonetheless provide opportunities for soldiers to push the boundaries of what was permissible and what was not. The form of the letter was used to further illicit activities and pass on news of discontent or trouble at home. The space of the colonial courtroom was reappropriated by sipahis in order to thwart the prosecution of their peers. The interrogation chamber was a forum for many soldiers to demonstrate that they no longer considered themselves subject to the rigours of British military discipline. In each example, however, it was not only the boundaries of sipahis' testimony that were being distended, but the boundaries of their own identities. Thus the nature of my thesis is to demonstrate how soldiers could re-read and re-write their own roles within the colonial Indian Army.

archivists, antiquarians, geographers and civil servants within the India Office reorganised the records of the East India Company, the Board of Control and the India Office itself into what is now the India Office Records. My thesis focuses on the earliest materials of the East India Company - the records of its trading activities in the Indian Ocean from 1600 to 1623 - and how these materials were absorbed into the India Office Records between 1875 and 1891. I study the documents themselves as evidence of a complex early modern documentary culture; then I study the processes by which they were absorbed into the India Office Records, classified, edited, interpreted, and publicized. I argue that the creators of the India Office Records - civil servants, antiquarians and geographers such as George Birdwood, F. C. Danvers, William Foster and Clements R. Markham - organised and interpreted their materials in the service of a teleological historiography of empire. I situate the archive's creation within the contexts of nineteenth-century archival, antiquarian and historiographical practice, the crisis of 'high imperialism' in the late nineteenth century, and the development of the 'exhibitionary complex', and locate it within the scholarly and governmental formations of the time. Ultimately I hope to demonstrate how the archive itself, as an apparently neutral repository of historical information, was in fact instrumental in the production of imperial discourse and ideology

This thesis traces the social networks of company directors involved in multinational commerce during the seventeenth century. It places commerce and directors at the centre of key economic, political and social developments during the seventeenth century, answering three interrelated questions: how did relationships between different corporate spheres change during the seventeenth century? How did the director develop as a socioeconomic agent during the seventeenth century? How did directors influence the formation of the English political economy? The first chapter defines the company director and places them in the wider historiographical traditions, while also outlining the methodological approaches used throughout the thesis. Chapter two examines how debates concerning the Virginia Company affected the wider community of company directors in the first decades of the seventeenth century, demonstrating how disparities in visions for trade created friction, which in turn affected the formation of governance in other companies. The third chapter analyses how the networks of different groups of directors developed during the civil wars and Interregnum period. The tension between the varied parties drove fertile debates on company formats, which stretched existing notions of corporate governance. Following on from this, chapter four traces how directors purged and counter-purged one another in during the Restoration. New networks were shaped by private trade overseas, by new extra-company institutions and by increased competition between companies. The growing differences between the Levant Company and the East India Company inspires renewed debates over directors' role. The fifth chapter investigates how directors became familiar in England during the late seventeenth century. The joint stock boom of the 1690s gave a new presence to commercial corporate governance in England, while the links between the director community and the English state were further cemented by foundation of the Bank of England. The final chapter examines the foundation of the New East India Company in 1698, as well as the subsequent merger of the old and new companies. The new company fractured and expanded of the director community. However, the merger between the two companies ignored contemporary political ideologies, and forged the directors' networks into a corporate superstructure. The dissertation challenges the assumption that conflicts between insiders and outsiders in the commercial community accelerated the formation of the English political economy by tracing networks across a community of diverse individuals. It offers a new understanding of the relationship between commerce, politics and society in seventeenth century England, and demonstrates the importance of company directors as socioeconomic agents, emphasising the social nature of the early modern trading corporation.

Few themes of modern Indian history could be as important as the history of the Indian National Congress. It has been truly said that "The history of the Indian national Congress is the history of the origin and development of national life in India." The history of the Congress is also the history of the Indian people in their struggle for freedom. As a result of the introduction of British rule over India and the influences which accompanied it, new social forces were generated which profoundly affected Indian society. As a result of the development of new professions and the growth of education and the press, a new class of persons had come into existence by the third quarter of the nineteenth century, whose interests clashed with those of the British bureaucracy in India. In their political outlook the members of this class were pro-British, and in their social outlook generally European. They did not contemplate the end of the British rule, but wanted a share in the Government of the country so that they might learn the British art of government and benefit from the blessings of the British Constitution.