David John Arnold

xi, 376 p. : 22 cm

Contributed articles drawn from a workshop held at the British Library on May 15-17, 2000.

A pioneering account of how small machines and consumer goods from Europe and North America became objects of everyday use in India in the course of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This text examines how bicycles, rice mills, sewing machines and typewriters shaped Indian society.

This book considers how nature - in both its biological and environmental manifestations - has been invoked as a dynamic force in human history. It shows how historians, philosophers, geographers, anthropologists and scientists have used ideas of nature to explain the evolution of cultures, to understand cultural difference, and to justify or condemn colonization, slavery and racial superiority. It examines the central part that ideas of environmental and biological determinism have played in theory, and describes how these ideas have served in different ways at different times as instruments of authority, identity and defiance. The book shows how powerful and problematic the invocation of nature can be.

"Burning the Dead traces the evolution of cremation in India and the South Asian diaspora across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Through interconnected histories of movement, space, identity, and affect, it examines how the "traditional" practice of Hindu cremation on an open-air funeral pyre was culturally transformed and materially refashioned under British rule, following intense Western hostility, colonial sanitary acceptance, and Indian adaptation. The book examines the critical reception of Hindu cremation abroad, particularly in Britain, where India formed a primary reference point for the cremation debates of the late nineteenth century, and it explores the struggle for the official recognition of cremation among Hindu and Sikh communities around the globe. Above all, David Arnold foregrounds the growing public presence and assertive political use made of Hindu cremation, its increasingly social inclusivity, and its close identification with Hindu reform movements and modern Indian nationhood"--

"It is generally assumed that tropical medicine only emerged as a medical specialism in the late nineteenth century under the aegis of men like Patrick Manson and Ronald Ross. However, recent research (much of it brought together for the first time in this volume) shows that a distinctive medicine of 'warm climates' came into existence much earlier in the areas like the West Indies, Indonesia and India. Europeans health needs were one imperative, but this was more than just the medicine of Europe shipped overseas. Contact with non-Western medical ideas and practices was also a stimulus, as was Europe's encounter with unfamiliar environments and peoples." "These essays provide valuable insights into the early history of tropical medicine and from the standpoint of several European powers. They examine the kinds of medicine practised, the responses to local diseases and environments and diseases, and the relationship between the old medicine of 'warm climates' and the emerging tropical medicine of the late nineteenth century. The volume as a whole expands the parameters for the discussion of the evolution of Western medicine and opens up new perspectives on European science and society overseas."--BOOK JACKET.