Sugata Bose

"Between 1850 and 1950, the Indian Ocean teemed with people, commodities and ideas ... Sugata Bose finds in these intricate social and economic webs evidence of the interdependence of the peoples of the lands beyond the horizon, from the Middle East to East Africa to Southeast Asia"--Dust jacket.

Drawing on the newest and most sophisticated historical research and scholarship in the field, this text provides a challenging insight for those with an intellectual curiosity about the region. After sketching the pre-modern history of the subcontinent, the text concentrates on the last three centuries.

The last two decades have witnessed 'the return of the peasant' to South Asian history. New empirical research and innovative methodologies have enabled this historical reconstruction of agrarian economics, politics and society in colonial and post-colonial India. In this key volume in the New Cambridge History of India, Professor Sugata Bose presents a critical synthesis of existing scholarship and offers a new interpretation of agrarian continuity and change from 1770 to the present. The author examines the related themes of demography, commodity production, agrarian social structure, and changing forms of peasant resistance. Agrarian relations are addressed along lines of gender and generation as well as class and community. By focussing on 'peasant labour', Bose integrates the histories of land and capital. He also explores the relationship between capitalist development of the economy under colonial rule and elements of both change and continuity at the point of primary production and appropriation. Although the author draws most of his empirical material from rural Bengal, he makes important comparisons with regional agrarian histories across India and beyond. Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital: Rural Bengal Since 1770 is essential reading for the understanding of rural India's colonial and post-colonial experience. It is also of relevance to all those interested in agrarian societies in the developing world and debates about the origins and character of agrarian capitalism.

On the Bangladesh freedom movement, 1971.

This volume represents a major contribution to the study of South Asian intellectual history in transnational perspective. It critically examines forms of South Asian cosmopolitanism in the era of anti-colonial agitation. Starting with the assertion that the history of political ideas in South Asia can neither be pictured as the contestation between well-defined `local' and `global' epistemes, nor as the battle between `patriotic' and `internationalist' perspectives, these essays throw unprecedented light on the intermediate spaces of intellectual encounter and interchange that linked South Asian thinkers to counterparts and conversations worldwide from the late nineteenth century through to independence. These essays discard presuppositions about hermetically-sealed local traditions endangered by `Westernizing' forces, and undo the stubborn tether that ties the study of colonial South Asian thought to the British metropolis alone. The imaginative and physical travels of intellectuals and political activists across oceans, from Johannesburg to Tokyo, from Calcutta to New York, or from Bombay to Rome, emerge as significant trajectories for the study of South Asian history within global horizons. The interactions with other colonized groups worldwide, with Europeans outside Britain and with minoritized communities in North America, constitute a largely unexplored archive for the study of modern South Asian history. --Book Jacket.

"The Indian Ocean interregional arena is a space of vital economic and strategic importance characterized by specialized flows of capital and labor, skills and services, and ideas and culture. Islam in particular and religiously informed universalism in general once signified cosmopolitanism across this wide realm. This historical reality is at variance with contemporary conceptions of Islam as an illiberal religion that breeds intolerance and terrorism. The future balance of global power will be determined in large measure by policies of key actors in the Indian Ocean and the lands that abut it rather than in the Atlantic or the Pacific. The interplay of multiple and competing universalisms in the Indian Ocean arena is in urgent need of better understanding. Oceanic Islam: Muslim Universalism and European Imperialism is a fresh contribution to Islamic and Indian Ocean studies alike, placing the history of modern South Asia in broader interregional and global contexts. It refines theories of universalism and cosmopolitanism while at the same time drawing on new empirical research. The essays in the volume bring the best academic scholarship on Islam in South Asia and across the Indian Ocean in the age of European empire to the readers"--

Contributed essays.

The man whom Indian nationalists perceived as the “George Washington of India” and who was President of the Indian National Congress in 1938–1939 is a legendary figure. Called Netaji (“leader”) by his countrymen, Subhas Chandra Bose struggled all his life to liberate his people from British rule and, in pursuit of that goal, raised and led the Indian National Army against Allied Forces during World War II. His patriotism, as Gandhi asserted, was second to none, but his actions aroused controversy in India and condemnation in the West. Now, in a definitive biography of the revered Indian nationalist, Sugata Bose deftly explores a charismatic personality whose public and private life encapsulated the contradictions of world history in the first half of the twentieth century"--Book jacket.

Contributed articles.