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“Ocean Bombay” is a social history of a colonial city of itinerants. Between 1839 and 1937 the actions of the British Indian colonial state and itinerancy upon one another shaped both the borders of the newly independent nations in 1947 and the changing notions of community and human relationship with space in the South Asian subcontinent. This dissertation charts the story of that development by studying itinerant groups staking their belonging to communities and space in colonial, port Bombay: Sidi shipworkers, Bombay-Aden merchants, Irani cafe owners, nomadic groups, publishers, filmmakers, and actresses. In doing so I intervene in the urban historiography of the city by writing about Bombay’s forgotten transoceanic past as a port city straddling the transformation of the subcontinent from colonial state to nation-state. Further, I rethink the concepts of “community” and border-making as used in South Asian historical and theoretical thinking by examining them through the lens of itinerancy and gender. “Ocean Bombay” thus locates Bombay society at the intersection of several oceanic geographies, through the study of an archive built from fragments and interviews collected across India, the United Kingdom, and Iran.

This thesis examines a series of episodes in the history of indirect rule that resulted in rulers being deposed or otherwise removed from power. It does so from the conviction that such episodes provide a valuable opportunity to explore the conceptions of princely character held and articulated by British officials, and to assess to what extent such conceptions informed British expectations of the princes, and thus shaped the daily and local practice of indirect rule in colonial India. The study is intended to contribute to the growing body of work on the history of the princely states, a subject that until recently was considered marginal to understanding colonial South Asia, but whose importance is increasingly being recognised. Its geographical focus – the states of the Central India Agency – attempts to redress the comparative neglect of this region to date; it also seeks to achieve a balance between the relative merits and shortcomings of single-state and 'all-India' studies, by allowing for intensive analysis of an interconnected group of rulers and officials, whilst maintaining a sufficiently diverse sample of situations and individuals to enable broader conclusions to be suggested. Moreover, the approach adopted firmly locates this thesis within the emerging study of the cultural history of empire: the rulers of the princely states occupied a position within the colonial hierarchies of class, race and gender that was uniquely liminal within India and rare elsewhere. They failed to fit neatly any of the pre-ordained categories of colonial society – and consequently had the potential to disrupt the conventions of deference, distance and difference on which such a society was based. Analysis of how the British attempted to characterise the princes, therefore, should complement existing analyses of the operation of such important concepts as race, masculinity, sexuality, sanity, class and tradition in colonial India. This study argues that British ideas and ideals of princely character were neither fixed nor hegemonic: conflict over the meaning and significance of a ruler's conduct regularly arose between the many levels of the imperial bureaucracy. There was not a single, consistent and explicitly defined normative discourse of princely conduct: officials' expectations of rulers shifted over time in response to the changing outlook and interests of the British in India, as well as varying across the significant differences of faith, race, region and status that they perceived to divide the princely order. Furthermore, rulers themselves – whether through negotiation, evasion or contestation – played a significant role in the constant redefinition of such ideas. However, British officials' conceptions and representations of princely character were not wholly constitutive of their power over the princes and their states. Although assessments of a ruler's character as inadequate, even incurably deviant, could be advanced as justification for intervening in a state, the impact of such ideas upon the actual practice of indirect rule was substantially qualified by an array of other considerations. Orientalist conceptions of princely character may have been highly influential in shaping the conduct of 'political relations', but they were often ignored or abandoned by officials when the dividends of a more pragmatic approach to the princes were thought to be higher.

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This dissertation explores the social and material arrangements in which the cotton market emerged as an object of social scientific inquiry and liberal government in Egypt during the first three decades of the British occupation (1882-1912). This new figuration of the cotton market did not emerge as the natural unfolding of a universal modernity, economic rationality or the inherent logic of capital. Instead, as this study demonstrates, it was a much more earthly affair. In the wake of financial and ecological crises, the colonial elite allied themselves with economists to embed new technologies of calculation into the Egyptian countryside. In the process, they reconfigured what a market was.

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The British colonial administration in India transformed Muslim law in the nineteenth century through the three concurrent processes of translation, legislation, and adjudication. Although Indian Muslims were gradually displaced in their traditional position as interpreters of that law in the role of muftis, discerning and applying the shari'ah according to Hanafi principles of fiqh, they nonetheless played a vital role in the transformation of Muslim law. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Muslim participation became more noticeable and significant as they moved into increasingly influential positions in the British judicial administration. Syed Mahmood (1850-1903) was a pioneer in this movement, being one of the first Indian Muslims to study law and become a barrister in England, being the first non-European member of the Allahabad Bar, and being the first Indian Muslim appointed to any High Court in British India. During his tenure as judge of the High Court at Allahabad, he wrote numerous judgments on matters of civil law, including matters which the British regime had determined were to be governed by Muslim law, or rather, by the amalgam of Muslim and English law called "Anglo-Mohammedan law" into which it had been transformed. He understood certain aspects Muslim law, especially criminal law and laws of evidence, to have been abrogated by British law in India, but stoutly resisted the incursion of English law and promoted the acceptance of Muslim law as the customary law in other areas. His critique of the British administration of justice in India and his persistent independence of thought while serving on the High Court brought him into conflict with his fellow judges. He was eventually forced to resign in 1892, but his recorded judgments in the Indian Law Reports continued to provide an authoritative exposition of Muslim law for succeeding generations of jurists. In addition to elucidating the transformation of Muslim law

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The purpose of this thesis is to examine the psycho-cultural dynamics of the interaction between the British community in India in the 19th century and the class of Indians educated in the English school system both in terms of the stress the encounter placed upon individuals of both cultural communities and the response initiated thereby. Although the emphasis of the study is on the impact of Western values and attitudes it is recognized that the source of psychological stress for Indians was the response of the British to the stress of contact with an alien culture. The cultural change induced by the British in India focused upon the Hindu religion, requiring a deep rearrangement of cultural values, motivations and their corresponding institutional structures. But it is seen that this kind of change is not easily accomplished. Indians could not reject their own cultural values and accept the alien ones without destroying their sense of identity which, being derived from the Hindu religion, was incompatible with the value system of the West. Though intellectually they identified with some values and ideas of the West, emotionally and socially they were tied to the culture patterns of traditional Hinduism. This conflict caused some Indians to experience a crisis of identity. In this thesis identity is defined as a function of religion. The religious system of a culture forms the matrix of all cultural values, beliefs, attitudes, and the sense of identity and serves as the organizing, integrating, and stabilizing principle of the social system and the personality. A crisis of identity becomes for the individual a crisis of belief. This was what occurred when the cultural values and beliefs of the Hindus were challenged by the alternate value system of the British which, when defined by the racist ideology and the colonial relationship, destroyed the sense of security and integrity of the native personality. British cultural attitudes are discussed in terms of the changing images of India and of Indians in the 19th century and interpreted in the context of the ideologies that inspired them. It is observed that the images of 19th century Indian culture are uniformly condemning but that the images of India's past and future vary according to the ideological stance of the image makers. The cultural attitude which prevailed throughout most of the century was one of intolerance stemming from the belief in the superiority of the British culture. This attitude created an atmosphere of cultural polarity and manifested itself in an invidious comparison between the two cultural groups. A framework is established for interpreting the Indian response to the impact of British cultural attitudes or, rather, to the crisis of identity and the loss of self-respect that the impact produced. The response was basically a defensive one. It involved a search for a new cultural identity which would relieve the stress of commitment to opposing value systems by effecting a compromise. Indians attempted this realignment via cultural historiography or cultural classicism, a process whereby they interjected 19th century Western values into their own cultural past thereby making those values seem generic to their tradition. Historiography "proved" that present (19th century) moribund values represented a deviation from the true values of the Hindu religion. This interpretive act rendered adjustment to and acceptance of change easier. It produced a cultural identity compatible with the experience of the contemporary Indian and provided a framework for the interpretation of traditional Hinduism according to the 19th century world view. The reinterpretive schemes of Raja Rammohun Roy and Swami Vivekānanda are used to illustrate the Indian response. Their images of India and of Indians are contained in the "myths" of the Indian Golden Age and Indian spirituality which were calculated to regenerate India and Indians to a position of dignity and equality in a world culture. / Arts, Faculty of / Classical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies, Department of / Graduate