Against Stigma: Studies in Caste, Race and Justice since Durban

Historical barriers still inhibit comparative frameworks to map and challenge two of the most odious forms of discrimination―racism and casteism. Both justify themselves on a principle of biological descent; they enable stigma as if it were a natural fact, refusing to see it as deleterious social exclusion.

Against Stigma carries fifteen essays that build upon the energies generated in scholarship as a result of the landmark 2001 World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance at Durban, South Africa. The contributors, who represent a multiplicity of disciplines and intellectual orientations, explore comparative aspects of caste and race including conundrums of a globalized discourse and national problematics of racism and casteism. The editors’ Introduction locates this comparative project around descent-based discrimination in a wide context; the editors suggest that globalization itself holds out the promise of more generalized practices of resistance and emancipation by oppressed national minorities. A critical bibliography on race and caste is a bonus to students and teachers of Human Rights, Race Relations, Caste Studies and Politics of Socio-economic Exclusion.

At a time when democratic movements are sweeping across the globe, Against Stigma presents a fresh selection of authoritative scholarship and instructive debates centred on race and caste, two of the most potent and divisive concepts in the histories of humanity, sociology and human governance.

Balmurli Natrajan is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at William Paterson University, New Jersey.

Paul Greenough is Professor of History and Community and Behavioral Health at the University of Iowa, Iowa City.

From Western Medicine to Global Medicine: The Hospital Beyond the West

The hospital has for many years been the symbol of modern, scientific medicine. Indeed, it was in the hospital that modern Western medicine was born. But until recently we had little idea of how or why these iconic medical institutions developed outside the Western World. From Western Medicine to Global Medicine provides the first book-length account of the hospital’s emergence in Asia, Africa and other non-Western contexts. Its essays examine various facets of hospital medicine from eighteenth century onwards, including interaction with indigenous traditions of healing and with economic and political issues during the colonial and post-colonial periods. An introductory essay provides an overview of the varied trajectories of institutional development taking place outside Europe and North America, while the individual contributions-from historians, anthropologists and sociologists-provide important insights into the varied uses and forms which hospitals have taken in non-Western contexts.

This interdisciplinary volume will provide an indispensable introduction to anyone seeking to understand the globalisation of Western medicine over the past century or so. It will be invaluable to historians seeking to place Western medicine within broad historical processes such as imperialism and modernisation, as well to those who seeks to know more about the peculiarities of specific contexts. Analysts of contemporary medical policy and medical cultures will also find critical insights into the factors determining the nature and success of medical interventions.

Mark Harrison is Professor of the History of Medicine and Director of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at the University of Oxford.

Margaret Jones is Research Officer at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Oxford.

Helen Sweet is Research Associate at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at the University of Oxford.

History of the Social Determinants of Health: Global Histories, Contemporary Debates

Every subject has its history, including the Social Determinants of Health. It is a subject that investigates differences in human health that occur because of social life, from income and class to family life and neighbourhood. Social determinants can have very large effects on longevity, just as do other determinants, such as the provision of medical care or clean drinking water. A Commission to study the social
determinants of health and to propose ways of improving health based upon their analysis was therefore established under the auspices of the World Health Organization and chaired by Professor Sir Michael Marmot.

In support of the work of the Commission, therefore, a large international meeting was organised in London in order to bring together some of the members of the Commission and several eminent historians to discuss the historical experience of people from around the globe. Because historians are among those who have tried to assess how social relationships have affected health, they can point to some determinants of health that others might miss, while historical investigations can in turn benefit from knowing what other analysts consider to be the most important social determinants of health. The result produced knowledge of importance to us all. Many of the arguments and evidence are therefore brought together here in one book, so that the work of the Commission and some of the debates it has prompted can be better known.

This is the first volume of its kind to bring historical studies to the investigation of the social determinants of health from a global perspective. It brings together eminent historians of international health to explore an important and topical subject. The contributors summarise a large body of recent historical literature in order to make it useful for policy analysts. It includes a wide range of international examples. It also includes two chapters on different methods of taking oral histories, which is a central concern for anyone who is interested in examining the recent past.

Harold J. Cook is the Director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London.

Sanjoy Bhattacharya is Reader in History at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL.

Anne Hardy is Deputy Director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL.

Pathways of Empire: Circulation, ‘Public Works’ and Social Space in Colonial Orissa, c. 1780–1914

More and ‘improved’ roads, railways and canals—are they ‘in the public interest’ under all circumstances? Phrases like ‘public works’ or ‘infrastructure’ are rarely subjected to historical reflection. Colonial, nationalist and postcolonial operators have presented their transport policies as if they were informed by the needs of a ‘general public’ and not shaped according to preferences of particularistic forces. Pathways of Empire moves beyond the technocratic progressivism of earlier writings on the history of transport. For the first time theories of ‘produced social space’ are concretised in order to open a new perspective on India’s social history of circulation and infrastructure. Moreover, the prevalent and narrow focus on railways is overcome. The effects of the ‘steam revolution’ are thus located in the wider context of existent South Asian regimes of circulation.

Part I of this book develops a conceptual framework of social space that is applied in Part II to the specific historical contexts of the British-ruled districts and princely states of Orissa in the long nineteenth century. It reconstructs the slow transformation of an ancien régime of circulation that largely survived the colonial annexation of coastal Orissa by half century into a new regime of circulation that was well tuned in to the exigencies of colonial capitalism by World War I.

Drawing upon extensive and unexplored archival materials, Ravi Ahuja discusses a wide range of issues including caravan and river trade, rural resistance against roads and canals, the effects of the 1866 famine, pilgrimage and migration, the commercialisation of princely states and the modernisation of forced labour.

Interesting features of this book are eight historical maps grouped towards the end of the book and a 20 x 30 pull out map which shows in great detail the uneven terrain of Orissa and the feudatory states. The latter is folded and tucked into a pocket on the inside of the back cover.

Ravi Ahuja teaches modern South Asian history at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. He has published widely on various problems of social history since the eighteenth century including labour, urbanism, infrastructure and war.

State of Vaccination:The Fight Against Smallpox in Colonial Burma

Researched in both London and Burma, State of Vaccination examines how a colonial medical establishment attempted to cope with the neglect that came from being on the periphery of British India. In Burma, local medical officers often doubled up as field officers, laboratory scientists, veterinarians, and teachers to compensate for the weak reach of the colonial state and the chronic shortages of funding and staff. More autonomy was surrendered to local colonial medical officers and the success of the vaccination effort was more vulnerable than in the presidencies to the limitations of transportation, preservation, and legislation, on the one hand, and the challenges of large-scale immigration, local inoculation, and indigenous resistance, on the other. By emphasizing the importance of the colonial medical sub-terrain on the periphery of British India, Atsuko Naono profiles the civil surgeon and his interactions with the local landscape. This book makes an important contribution to our understanding of the history of colonial medicine in Asia.

This study begins in the nineteenth century, when Burma came under British rule after three successive wars, and ends with the constitutional separation from India in 1937. Compared to other areas that were a part of British India, Burma rarely figures in studies of colonial health in the British Empire. As a useful countervailing example of medicine under the Raj, incongruities between the colonial medicine practiced on the subcontinent and its periphery Burma are highlighted.

Atsuko Naono is associate fellow with the Department of History at the University of Warwick and research associate with the Centre for South East Asian Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (London).

Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine and Science in the Age of Empire

In this wide-ranging and stimulating book, a leading authority on the history of medicine and science presents convincing evidence that Dutch commerce, not religion, inspired the rise of science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Harold Cook scrutinises a wealth of historical documents relating to the study of medicine and natural history in the Netherlands, Europe, Brazil, South Africa, and Asia during this era, and his conclusions are fresh and exciting. He uncovers direct links between the rise of trade and commerce in the Dutch Empire and the flourishing of scientific investigation. Cook argues that engaging in commerce changed the thinking of Dutch citizens, leading to a new emphasis on such values as objectivity, accumulation, and description. The preference for accurate information that accompanied the rise of commerce also laid the groundwork for the rise of science globally, wherever the Dutch engaged in trade. Medicine and natural history were fundamental aspects of this new science, as reflected in the development of gardens for both pleasure and botanical study, anatomical theatres, curiosity cabinets, and richly illustrated books about nature. Sweeping in scope and original in its insights, this book revises previous understandings of the history of science and ideas.

Harold J. Cook is director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine and professor at University College London.

Healing at the Borderland of Medicine and Religion

One of the transformations facing health care in the twenty-first century is the safe, effective, and appropriate integration of conventional, or biomedical, care with complementary and alternative medical (CAM) therapies, such as acupuncture, chiropractic, massage therapy, herbal medicine, and spiritual healing. In Healing at the Borderland of Medicine and Religion, Michael H. Cohen discusses the need for establishing rules and standards to facilitate appropriate integration of conventional and CAM therapies.

The kind of integrated health care many patients seek dwells in a borderland between the physical and the spiritual, between the quantifiable and the immeasurable, Cohen observes. But this mix of care fails to present clear rules for clinicians regarding which therapies to recommend, accept, or discourage, and how to discuss patient requests regarding inclusion of such therapies. Focusing on the social, intellectual, and spiritual dimensions of integrative care and grounding his analysis in the attendant legal, regulatory, and institutional changes, Cohen provides a multidisciplinary examination of the shift to a more fluid, pluralistic health care environment.

Michael H. Cohen holds a joint appointment as assistant clinical professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and assistant professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at Harvard School of Public Health. He is also senior lecturer at the University of the Bahamas, president of the Institute for Integrative and Energy Medicine, and principal in the Law Offices of Michael H. Cohen. He is author of five books, including Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Legal Boundaries and Regulatory Perspectives.

The Colonial City and the Challenge of Modernity: Urban Hegemonies and Civic Contestations in Bombay City (1900–1925)

This is an original story about the coming of ‘modernity’ in Bombay city in the early twentieth century.

In his account, Sandip Hazareesingh shows how this most global of forces had complex and contradictory meanings in the local urban setting of colonial Bombay. A colonial technological version helped consolidate British hegemony over this important Asian port city; in contrast, Gandhi’s rejection of the colonial urban helped define his search for a counter-modern, traditionalist basis for the emerging nationalist contestation of colonial rule. But Bombay also housed different, radical apprehensions of modernity, exemplified by the militant daily newspaper the Bombay Chronicle, which provided an alternative basis for the construction of a local civic nationalism.

In a era characterised by war and the curtailment of civil liberties, the eruption of some of the most significant forms of modernity into the everyday life of the city – newspapers, cinema, labour strikes, demands for civic equality – revealed the contradictions of colonial hegemony and underlined the class-bound nature of the urban social order. Grappling with these new forces were a rich cast of characters who are brought to life in these pages, including B.G. Horniman, Gandhi, Patrick Geddes, George Lloyd, and Jinnah.

Elegantly written, The Colonial City and the Challenge of Modernity offers fresh and stimulating insights into the multi-layered relationships between modernity, colonialism, and the production of urban space.

Sandip Hazareesingh received his doctorate from the University of Warwick and is currently Lecturer at the Open University’s Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies (www.open.ac.uk/Arts/ferguson-centre) where he convenes the Historical Globalisation Network.

Refiguring Unani Tibb: Plural Healing in Late Colonial India

Refiguring Unani Tibb examines the ways in which unani tibb reconstituted its identity in the light of modernising trends at the turn of the twentieth century in India. It brings out the heterogeneity of unani tibb in late colonial India that frequently defies its commonly ascribed label as a ‘traditional Muslim system’ of medicine. Through an analysis of interconnecting themes Guy Attewell draws attention to the tensions manifest in different spheres of unani activity as practitioners reconfigured their knowledge and practices through the prisms of biomedical concepts, language, nationalist and communitarian politics, changing social and moral norms, and colonial-inspired models of legitimacy. The book shows that while tibb has always been a cosmopolitan profession, the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw a fundamental transition from a principally localised, personalised practice to one that had to engage and be represented in a mass, public arena for status, recognition and custom. This transition, the book argues, was neither complete nor uniform. The study draws on a range of material in Urdu, Arabic and Persian, including texts, pamphlets and journals, in addition to archival records in Hyderabad and London, to draw out the complexity and contingency in the evolution of a plural and extraordinarily dynamic tradition of healing.

Guy Attewell is a Research Fellow at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine in London researching the neglected sphere of tibb in Tamil.

27 Down: New Departures in Indian Railway Studies

Hitherto, the study of India’s railways has run along a few, increasingly well-travelled tracks. The central goal of 27 Down with its nine, new, railway-related studies—and much else thanks to its enclosed CD-ROM—is to explore some of the neglected dimensions of India’s colonial and postcolonial railways. The contributors, a stimulating mix of younger and older scholars, explore vastly different aspects of India’s railways, past and present. Railways and the nineteenth century capitalist development of South Asia, porters at a twenty-first-century Mumbai station, late nineteenth-century Hindi accounts of train travel, post-1947 films and writings that represent railways during the Partition of India, railway art on Bangladeshi rikshas, railway workshop labour, financing and managing the railways of North India, an exploration of why India’s railways did not contribute more positively to colonial India’s economic development, plus much more are found in the text and on the CD-ROM. Thus, social, political, cultural and economic dimensions of India’s railways are among the new departures in Indian railway studies found within this volume.

27 Down is a train with multiple destinations. Each exploratory trip is different but the contributors share an interest in the method of travel, India’s fascinating railways.

Ian J. Kerr is a Research Associate of the Department of History, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and a Senior Scholar, History, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. He has written or edited many books or articles examining aspects of India’s railway and labour history.

Decentring Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World

This volume charts a new direction in the study of British imperialism, its impact on India and other colonial territories, and its influence in propelling the forces of globalisation. Moving beyond the standard model of a bilateral circuit between imperial centre and colonial periphery, it highlights instead the web of transcolonial and transnational networks that spread across and beyond the empire, operating both on its behalf and against its interests. It suggests that these networks worked in effect to decentre empire, shaping the multidimensional contours of the global modernity we contend with today.

Decentring Empire brings together thirteen original essays by some of the leading scholars of British imperialism, their contributions offered in honour of Thomas R. Metcalf, the distinguished historian of colonial India. The essays range widely in scope, moving in time from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century, in space from India to Ireland and Australia and elsewhere across the imperial map, and in topic from economic, political, and social to medical, legal, and cultural concerns. Taken together, they demonstrate the analytical richness of current scholarship on British colonialism in India and elsewhere and give fresh insights into its role in the making of the modern world. This is history at the cutting edge, an important contribution to the ongoing debate about empire and its consequences.

DURBA GHOSH is Assistant Professor of History at Cornell University. She has published articles in the Historical Journal, Modern Asian Studies, the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, and several edited volumes.

DANE KENNEDY is the Elmer Louis Kayser Professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He is the author of several books on British colonialism, including The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj (1996). His intellectual biography of Sir Richard Burton, The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World was published in 2005.

Expunging Variola: The Control and Eradication of Smallpox in India, 1947–1977

As a crucial component of the global smallpox eradication programme, which has been widely hailed as one of the greatest public health successes in the twentieth century, the Indian experience has some important stories to tell. Expunging Variola reveals these as it chronicles the last three decades of the anti-smallpox campaigns in India.

This wide-ranging study, based on extensive archival research in India, Britain, Switzerland and the United States of America, assesses the many complexities in the formulation and implementation of the smallpox eradication programme in the subcontinent. Rather than merely cataloguing the developments of this extremely complex exercise within the World Health Organisation headquarters in Geneva and the Indian central government in New Delhi, this book adopts a much broader perspective: it makes a conscious effort to provide a detailed view by including the accounts of WHO, governmental and nongovernmental personnel on the ground. In this manner, nuanced descriptions of important – and often controversial – situations are provided. Thus, apart from acknowledging the influence of national-, state- and district-level political, economic and social structures in continually reshaping the contours of the smallpox campaigns, this work also emphasises the crucial role played by field workers in implementing and often reinterpreting health strategies proposed by Geneva and New Delhi.

Original not only in perspective but in material, based as it is on a wide range of sources which have never been exploited by academics before, Expunging Variola breaks new ground in the historiography of smallpox eradication in the subcontinent.

The book serves as a companion volume to Fractured States which covers the period 1800-1947.

Sanjoy Bhattacharya is Lecturer at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London. Sanjoy is the author of Propaganda and Information in Eastern India, 1939-45: A Necessary Weapon of War (2001), Fractured States: Smallpox, Public Health and Vaccination Policy in British India, 1800-1947 (Orient Blackswan and Sangam Books: New Delhi and London, 2005), and several articles relating to the medical, social and political history of India.

Health, Medicine and Empire

This collection of essays weaves together several themes related to the social history of health and medicine in colonial India. Its focus ranges from analysing Europe's relationship with India's indigenous medical systems, to case studies of two mental asylums(in Madras and Lucknow), the location of the leprosy asylum, the technological aspects and social implications of the colonial vaccination policy, and to colonial interventions related specifically to cholera and plague in the pilgrimage centres of puri and pandharpur. It also examine indigenous initiatives associated with the Indian drug industry and the Unani medical system and their interactions with the colonial health establishment and modern medicine.

Besides charting out hiterto unexplored areas in the history and historiography of colonial medicine and its articulation with indigenous systems, this book demonstrates the rich possibilities of inter-disciplinary research. Of particular interest to the specialist reader, it is also useful to those working on modern India history, cultural studies and sociology.

Biswamoy pati, is Reader at the Department of History, Sri Venkateswara College, Delhi University. He is the author of Situating Social History: Orissa, 1800-1997 (2001); and resisting Domination: Peasants, Tribals and the National Movement in Orissa, 1920-50 (1993). He has edited Turbulent Times: India, 1940-1944 (1998); and Issues in Modern India History: for Sumit Sarkar (2000).

Mark Harrison, is Senior Research fellow and Assistant Director of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Oxford. He was formerly senior Lecturer in History at the Sheffield Hallam University. His publications include public Health in British India: anglo-India preventive Medicine, 1859-1914 (1994) and Climates and Constitutions: Health, race, environment and British Imperialism in South Asia, 1600-1850 (1999).

Old Potions, New Bottles: Recasting Indigenous Medicine in Colonial Punjab 1850–1940

Old Potions, New Bottles is a study of how indigenous medical learning and practices were recast and reformulated with the coming of western medicine and western medical ideas through colonial rule.

Analysing local responses to global enforcements in a specific yet massive terrain—namely, colonial Punjab—Kavita Sivaramakrishnan explores the processes by which this region’s Ayurvedic practitioners and publicists set about reordering ideas and mobilising networks in response to the claims of western medicine and its implicit validation of colonial rule. She shows that vaid practitioners engaged with the scientific authority of western medicine in the colony through writings and other efforts in a print-based public sphere. Facing both threat and competition, local practitioners were forced to address and propagate new forms of medical reason to legitimise and revalidate the indigenous scientific basis of their learning. In part, this meant reinterpreting Ayurved’s claims to status and authority.

This book also explores the engagements between Ayurved and Yunani indigenous practices, thereby looking beyond the confining binaries of Asian and western medical systems. It argues for an understanding of the contextual politics of indigenous medicine as a fluid and complex body of ideas as well as representations of religious identities and linguistic alignments. Vaid claims to patronage and representation now meant nothing less than recasting vaid identity in Punjab; and this was marked by irregular alignments and multiple imaginings. In showing this, the author suggests new perspectives on Hindu reformist politics, its ambiguities and fractures. Patrons and publicists in the medical public sphere were forging new forms of Sikh community identity and a Hindu nation-in-the-making, even as they were, simultaneously and disparately, projecting an altered vocabulary of Ayurvedic learning in Hindi and Gurmukhi.

Drawing upon years of fieldwork across Punjab, Kavita Sivaramakrishnan examines, alongside the standard archives, a vast number of vernacular pamphlets, tracts and magazines—many for the first time. This is supplemented and enriched by interviews with Ayurvedic practitioners and families of hereditary practitioners, as well as data from private collections and diaries that have never been accessed until now.

Kavita Sivaramakrishnan studied history at St. Stephens College, Delhi, and Trinity College, Cambridge. Her Ph.D. is from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.

Reproductive Health in India: History, Politics, Controversies

Within the scholarly fields of demography, development studies, medical anthropology and public policy, the history of reproduction has been dominated by preconceived and often a-historical ideas about India’s supposed long-term trend towards “over-population.” When these scholarly fields have invoked histories of fertility and contraception, these histories have largely been made to serve as the “pre-modern” antithesis to a fully “modern” future.

In contrast, this volume brings together historians to tackle the complex questions of reproduction in modern India. Taken together, these essays interrogate the very idea that reproduction is simply a linch-pin for effecting other social and economic transformations. Instead, these histories map out and ask questions of the institutions, discourses and practices by which women's reproductive health came to hold meaning and play strategic roles in the multiple and at times competing agendas such as social reform, the medical sciences, cultural nationalism, and colonial public health.

Sarah Hodges is Lecturer in the Department of History, University of Warwick.

Fractured States: Smallpox, Public Health and Vaccination Policy in British India

This work provides a well rounded history of official smallpox measures and their links with the development of public health in policies and programmes in Brititsh India. It examines vaccination policy and technology from a political, economic and technical perspective as well as the cultural and religious implications of medical intervention in smallpox eradication. There is an exposition of the complex and sometimes contradictory official and civilian attitudes toward the development of smallpox control and public health measures in India.

Sanjoy Bhattacharya is Lecturer at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London.

Mark Harrison is Director of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at the University of Oxford and Reader in the History of Medicine within the Modern History faculty.

Michael Warboys is Director of the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine and the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at the University of Manchester.

Health Policy in Britain's Model Colony: Ceylon (1900-1948)

Was Western medicine a positive benefit of colonialism or one of its agents of oppression? This question has prompted a vigorous historical and political debate and is explored here in the context of the 'model' British colony of Ceylon.

In this study, Margaret Jones emphasises the need for both a broad perspective and a more complex analysis. Colonial medicine is critiqued not merelyu in the political and economic context of imperialism but also against the background of human needs and rights. Her research is underscored by a detailed analysis of public health measures and services in Ceylon. One of its key findings is the accommodation achieved between Western and indigenous medicine. Throughout this work, Jones provides nuanced readings of the categories of colonised and coloniser, as well as the concept of colonial medicine.

Health Policy in Britain's Model Colony provides an understanding of historical trends while simultaneously avoiding generalisations that subsume events and actions. Written in a compelling and lucid style, it is a path-breaking contribution to the history of medicine.

Margaret Jones is Research Officer at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Oxford. She has published widely in the history of colonial medicine and is joint editor of Beveridge to blair: The First Fifty Years of the British Welfare State (Manchester University Press, 2002).

Travels to Europe: Self and Other in Bengali Travel Narratives, 1870-1910

This work examines in detail the world of travelogues of a highly interesting culture-universe: the Bengali bhadralok. A travelogue is usually a crucial political/aesthetic text. Its very fabric is structured in space and power - it creates, relates, compares and contrasts spaces and powers. Bengalis travelling to Europe in the colonial period felt compelled to produce such texts. An analysis of these works from a historian's angle provides crucial windows to the colonised mind striving for self-definition.

Trailokyanath Mukherjee, Romesh Chandra Dutt, Krishnabhabini Das, Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore and other travellers aimed to demystify the myth of Europe by establishing physical contact. Their depictions of the reality of the colonial metropolis served as acts of self-assertion, dislocating England from its position of centrality.

Simonti Sen studies in detail the conflicted narratives of minds that aimed to reconcile a Western education with an incipient sense of national self. In doing so, she raises issues regarding national definition which are as relevant today as they were a century ago. This work would appeal to readers interested in the history of India and, in particular, of Bengal; it would also appeal to those involved in literature and cultural studies.

Simonti Sen teaches History in Bidhannagar College, Kolkata. She has written several articles on bengali travel accounts and has edited Krishnabhabini Daser Englandey Banga Mahila (Calcutta: Stree, 1996), a new edition of Krishnabhabini Das's travel accounts.

Science and National Consciousness in Bengal, 1870–1930

This book gives a flavour of the Indian response to modern science by analysing the lives and careers of four scientifically influential personalities in Bengal. His analysis of the careers of two scientists, J. C. Bose and P. C. Ray, and two institution builders, Mahendralal Sircar and Asutosh Mookerjee, brings to light the issues related to science at a time of colonialism and nationalism. Scientists often had to depend on British institutions for legitimation and funding, while also supporting the nationalist cause for greater autonomy.

One of the central claims of this book is that the protagonists aimed to contribute to a modern world science, one based on a strong sense of universalism. They did not aim to construct any “alternative” sciences, though they did express and apply their work by drawing on their cultural heritage. This makes Science and National Consciousness a work of particular relevance today, when a homogenous, instrumentalist and totally Western conception of science is being globally accepted.

J. Lourdusamy is Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, which he joined after his doctoral studies at Oxford. His broad areas of interest include history of science and the interaction of science and religion.

Civilising Natures: Race, Resources and Modernity in Colonial South India

Science, both as a scholarly discipline and as a concept in the popular imagination, was critical to building hegemony in the British Empire. It also inspired alternative ideas of progress by elites and the disenfranchised: these competing spectres continue to haunt postcolonial modernities. Why and how has science so powerfully shaped both the common sense of individuals and the development of postcolonial states? Philip suggests that our ideas of race and resources are key.

Civilising Natures tells us how race and nature are fundamental to understanding colonial modernities, and along the way, it complicates our understandings of the relationships between science and religion, pre-modern and civilised, environment and society.

Kavita Philip is currently Associate Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of California, Irvine.