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"India Intellectual life 18th century."
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British orientalisms, 1759-1835
\"In 1761 Richard Owen Cambridge published An Account of the War in India, telling the story of a decade of conflict between British and French forces in the south of the sub-continent. While this work says nothing about the 1757 battle of Plassey and the subsequent revolution that lead to the East India Company (hereafter EIC) gaining sovereign power in Bengal, it testifies to 'the great reputation which the nation, and so many individuals have acquired in the East-Indies'. Cambridge suggested that those, like him, without first-hand experience of India might already be primed to receive news of Britons' fantastic exploits there because of the 'Eastern' fictions to which they were accustomed: 'It will not appear strange that the generality of the world, through the habits of reading novels, and works of the imagination, should expect from an history of the East (... the scene of most of their ideal stories) a tale of adventures full of wonder and novelty, and nearly bordering upon romance'\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Birth of Orientalism
Modern Orientalism is not a brainchild of nineteenth-century European imperialists and colonialists, but, as Urs App demonstrates, was born in the eighteenth century after a very long gestation period defined less by economic or political motives than by religious ideology.
Based on sources from a dozen languages, many unavailable in English,The Birth of Orientalismpresents a completely new picture of this protracted genesis, its underlying dynamics, and the Western discovery of Asian religions from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. App documents the immense influence of Japan and China and describes how the Near Eastern cradle of civilization moved toward mother India. Moreover, he shows that some of India's purportedly oldest texts were products of eighteenth-century European authors.
Though Western engagement with non-Abrahamic Asian religions reaches back to antiquity and can without exaggeration be called the largest-scale religiocultural encounter in history, it has so far received surprisingly little attention-which is why some of its major features and their role in the birth of modern Orientalism are described here for the first time. The study of Asian documents had a profound impact on Europe's intellectual makeup. Suddenly the Bible had much older competitors from China and India, Sanskrit threatened to replace Hebrew as the world's oldest language, and Judeo-Christianity appeared as a local phenomenon on a dramatically expanded, worldwide canvas of religions and mythologies. Orientalists were called upon as arbiters in a clash that involved neither gold and spices nor colonialism and imperialism but, rather, such fundamental questions as where we come from and who we are: questions of identity that demanded new answers as biblical authority dramatically waned.
eBook
The making of India : the untold story of British enterprise
The story of this book begins in the seventeenth century, when a small sea-faring island, one tenth the size of the Indian subcontinent, despatched sailing ships over 11,000 miles on a five-month trading journey in search of new opportunities. In the end they helped build a new nation. The sheer audacity and scale of such an endeavour, the courage and enterprise, have no parallel in world history. This book is the first to assess in a single volume almost all aspects of Britain's remarkable contribution in providing India with its lasting institutional and physical infrastructure, which continues to underpin the world's largest democracy in the twenty-first century.
Book
The Wahhabis Seen through European Eyes (1772-1830)
In The Wahhabis seen through European Eyes (1772-1830) Giovanni Bonacina offers an account of the early reactions in Europe to the rise of the Wahhabi movement in Arabia. Commonly pictured nowadays as a form of Muslim fundamentalism, the Wahhabis appeared to many European witnesses as the creators of a deistic revolution with serious political consequences for the Ottoman ancien regime. They were seen either in the light of contemporary events in France, or as Islamic theological reformers in the mould of Calvin, opposing an established church and devotional traditions. These audacious but fascinating attempts to interpret the unknown by way of the better known are illustrated in Bonacina's book.
eBook
Letters Home: Banaras pandits and the Maratha regions in early modern India
Maratha Brahman families migrated to Banaras in increasing numbers from the early sixteenth century. They dominated the intellectual life of the city and established an important presence at the Mughal and other north Indian courts. They retained close links with Brahmans back in the Maratha regions, where pressures of social change and competition for rural resources led to acrimonious disputes concerning ritual entitlement and precedence in the rural social order. Parties on either side appealed to Banaras for resolution of the disputes, raising serious questions about the nature of Brahman community and identity. Banaras pandit communities struggled to contain these disputes, even as the symbols of their own authority came under attack from the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. By the early eighteenth century, the emergence of the Maratha state created new models of Brahman authority and community, and new patterns for the resolution of such disputes.
Journal Article
Hybrid knowledge in the early East India Company world
Hybrid Knowledge in the Early East India Company World presents a new reading of the English East India Company 1660-1720. It shows how innovative works covering natural history, ethnography, theology, linguistics, medicine, and agriculture - were created amid early modern struggles for supremacy in Asia, the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic.
eBook