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  • Himanshu Upadhyaya, "Critical Insights on Colonial Modes of Seeing Cattle in India (1850–1980)" (Springer, 2024)
    2024/10/25
    Critical Insights on Colonial Modes of Seeing Cattle in India: Tracing the Pre-history of Green and White Revolutions (Springer 2024) traces the contours of the symbiotic relationship between crop cultivation and cattle rearing in India by reading against the grain of several official accounts from the late colonial period to the 1980s. It also skillfully unpacks the multiple cultural expressions that revolve around cattle in India and the wider subcontinent to show how this domestic animal has greatly impacted political discourses in South Asia from colonial times, into the postcolonial period. The author begins by demonstrating the dependence between the nomadic cattle breeder and the settled cultivator, at the nexus of land-livestock-agriculture, as indicated in the writings of Sir Albert Howard, who espoused some of the most sophisticated ideas on integration, holism, and mixed farming in an era when agricultural research was marked by increasing specialisation and compartmentalization. The book springboards with the views of colonial experts who worked at imperial science institutions but passionately voiced dissenting opinions due to their emotional investment in the lives of Indian peasants, of whom Howard was a leading light. The book presents Howard and his contemporaries’ writings to then engage contemporary debates surrounding organic agriculture and climate change, tracing the path out of the treadmill of industrial agriculture and factory farming. In doing so, the book shows how, historically, animal rearing has been critically linked to livelihood strategies in the Indian subcontinent. At once a dispassionate reflection on the role played by cattle and water buffaloes in not just supporting farm operations in the agro-pastoral landscape, but also in contributing to millions of livelihoods in sustainable ways while fulfilling the animal protein in the Indian diet, the book presents contemporary lessons on development perspectives relating to sustainable and holistic agriculture. A rich and sweeping treatment of this aspect of environmental history in India that tackles the transformations prompted by the arrival of veterinary medicine, veterinary education and notions of scientific livestock management, the book is a rare read for historians, environmentalists, agriculturalists, development practitioners, and animal studies scholars with a particular interest in South Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies
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    58 分
  • Deborah Valenze, "The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History" (Yale UP, 2023)
    2024/10/24
    A radical new reading of eighteenth-century British theorist Thomas Robert Malthus, which recovers diverse ideas about subsistence production and environments later eclipsed by classical economics With the publication of Essay on the Principle of Population and its projection of food shortages in the face of ballooning populations, British theorist Thomas Robert Malthus secured a leading role in modern political and economic thought. In this startling new interpretation, Deborah Valenze reveals how canonical readings of Malthus fail to acknowledge his narrow understanding of what constitutes food production. Valenze returns to the eighteenth-century contexts that generated his arguments, showing how Malthus mobilized a redemptive narrative of British historical development and dismissed the varied ways that people adapted to the challenges of subsistence needs. She uses history, anthropology, food studies, and animal studies to redirect our attention to the margins of Malthus’s essay, where activities such as hunting, gathering, herding, and gardening were rendered extraneous. She demonstrates how Malthus’s omissions and his subsequent canonization provided a rationale for colonial imposition of British agricultural models, regardless of environmental diversity. By broadening our conception of human livelihoods, Valenze suggests pathways to resistance against the hegemony of Malthusian political economy. The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History (Yale UP, 2023) invites us to imagine a world where monoculture is in retreat and the margins are recentered as spaces of experimentation, nimbleness, and human flourishing. Deborah Valenze is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of History at Barnard College. A recipient of numerous fellowships, she has written four previous books on British culture and economic life. She lives in Cambridge, MA, and New York City. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies
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    1 時間 12 分
  • Corey Ross, "Liquid Empire: Water and Power in the Colonial World" (Princeton UP, 2024)
    2024/10/17
    In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a handful of powerful European states controlled more than a third of the land surface of the planet. These sprawling empires encompassed not only rainforests, deserts, and savannahs but also some of the world’s most magnificent rivers, lakes, marshes, and seas. Liquid Empire: Water and Power in the Colonial World (Princeton University Press, 2024) by Dr. Corey Ross tells the story of how the waters of the colonial world shaped the history of imperialism, and how this imperial past still haunts us today. Spanning the major European empires of the period, Dr. Ross describes how new ideas, technologies, and institutions transformed human engagements with water and how the natural world was reshaped in the process. Water was a realm of imperial power whose control and distribution were closely bound up with colonial hierarchies and inequalities—but this vital natural resource could never be fully tamed. Ross vividly portrays the efforts of officials, engineers, fisherfolk, and farmers to exploit water, and highlights its crucial role in the making and unmaking of the colonial order. Revealing how the legacies of empire have persisted long after colonialism ebbed away, Liquid Empire provides needed historical perspective on the crises engulfing the world’s waters, particularly in the Global South, where billions of people are faced with mounting water shortages, rising flood risks, and the relentless depletion of sea life. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies
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    1 時間 23 分
  • Jane Lydon, "Anti-Slavery and Australia: No Slavery in a Free Land?" (Routledge, 2021)
    2024/10/15
    Bringing the histories of British anti-slavery and Australian colonization together changes our view of both. Anti-Slavery and Australia: No Slavery in a Free Land? (Routledge, 2021) explores the anti-slavery movement in imperial scope, arguing that colonization in Australasia facilitated emancipation in the Caribbean, even as abolition powerfully shaped the Settler Revolution. The anti-slavery campaign was deeply entwined with the administration of the empire and its diverse peoples, as well as the radical changes demanded by industrialization and rapid social change in Britain. Abolition posed problems to which colonial expansion provided the answer, intimately linking the end of slavery to systematic colonization and Indigenous dispossession. By defining slavery in the Caribbean as the opposite of freedom, a lasting impact of abolition was to relegate other forms of oppression to lesser status, or to deny them. Through the shared concerns of abolitionists, slave-owners, and colonizers, a plastic ideology of 'free labour' was embedded within post-emancipation imperialist geopolitics, justifying the proliferation of new forms of unfree labour and defining new racial categories. The celebration of abolition has overshadowed post-emancipation continuities and transformations of slavery that continue to shape the modern world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies
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    1 時間 30 分
  • Jamie Furlong and Will Jennings, "The Changing Electoral Map of England and Wales" (Oxford UP, 2024)
    2024/10/15
    What is the connection between where people live and how they vote? In The Changing Electoral Map of England and Wales (Oxford UP, 2024), Jamie Furlong a Research Fellow at the University of Westminster and Will Jennings Associate Dean Research & Enterprise and Professor at the University of Southampton, analyse the continuities and changes in history of party support at general elections. The book uses a variety of methods- and a huge range of data- to critically interrogate the idea of ‘left behind’ places, as well as interrogating the long term social, economic, and cultural changes associated with those places and that idea. Rich in detail, including case studies of places that stand out within the overall trends, and accessibly written, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies
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    50 分
  • Christian Velasco, "Commercial Banking in Kenya: A History from Colonisation to Digital Age" (Routledge, 2024)
    2024/10/15
    Commercial Banking in Kenya: A History from Colonisation to Digital Age (Routledge, 2024) investigates the impact of commercial banks in Kenya right through from their origins, to their role during the colonial period, the process of adaptation following independence, and up to their responses to new challenges and economic policies in the twenty-first century. The British colonisation of East Africa required the development of diverse political, social and economic institutions to advance and exercise control over the territories and their populations. Multinational commercial banks were among the first institutions, with the National Bank of India, Standard Bank of South Africa and Barclays Bank DCO all setting up business in Kenya, whilst continuing to maintain close relationships with the UK and other colonial actors. This book assesses the impact of commercial banks during the last years of colonial domination and the tools they used to adapt in the first decades of independence. The book concludes by considering how the colonial banking system has influenced the development of modern financial institutions in Kenya in the twenty-first century. This book argues that commercial banks are fundamental to understanding African colonies, and the foundations over which the financial system of contemporary Africa was constructed. It will be of interest to researchers of banking, economic history, the colonial period, and African studies. Christian Velasco was born in Mexico City and studied History at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where he specialized in economic history. In 2013, he was awarded a master's degree at the London School of Economics, with a comparative study of banking in Ghana and Botswana. The University of Warwick awarded him a PhD in 2019, working under the supervision of David Anderson and Daniel Branch, with a dissertation titled The Kenyan Banking System: From Colonial Expansion to Independence Uncertainty, 1950–1970. He is currently full-time academic staff at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económica (CIDE) in Mexico City. Other publications discussed during the interview are: Rouse, M. , Bátiz-Lazo, B., and Carbo-Valverde, S. (2023) ‘M-Pesa and the role of the entrepreneurial state in a cashless technology to deliver an inclusive financial sector’, Essays in Economic and Business History, 41, pp. 109-133. Velasco, C. (2022), "The African Savers and the Post Office Savings Bank in Colonial Kenya (1910–1954)," The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, DOI: 10.1080/03086534.2021.2020426 Willis, J. & Velasco, C. (2024), "Saving, Inheritance and Future-Making in 1940s Kenya," Past & Present, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtae013 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies
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    56 分
  • Donald R. Hickey, "Tecumseh's War: The Epic Conflict for the Heart of America" (Westholme, 2023)
    2024/10/14
    The Shawnee leader Tecumseh came to prominence in a war against the United States waged from 1811 to 1815. In 1805, Tecumseh's younger brother Lalawethika (soon to be known as "the Prophet") had a vision for an Indian revitalization movement that would restore Native culture and resist American expansion. Tecumseh organized the growing support for this movement, which came from Indigenous peoples across the Old Northwest and parts of the Great Plains, into a loose but powerful military alliance. In late 1811, while Tecumseh was away on a recruiting mission in the South, General William Henry Harrison led an army to the center of Native resistance at Prophetstown in present-day Indiana. In the early morning hours of November 7, in what came to be known as the Battle of Tippecanoe, Harrison's men fought off an Indian attack, which marked the beginning of Tecumseh's War. Seven months later, when the United States declared war on Britain, thus initiating the War of 1812, the British and Tecumseh forged an alliance against the United States. Initially, the Anglo-Indian alliance enjoyed considerable success at Detroit, Chicago, Mackinac, and elsewhere, exposing much of the Old Northwest to border warfare, but the tide turned in 1813 when Harrison invaded Canada. On October 5 the American army defeated a much smaller Anglo-Indian force in the climactic Battle of the Thames. Tecumseh was killed in this battle, and although his confederacy disintegrated, British support ensured that the Indian war would continue for another two years with the Sauk chief Black Hawk now providing the inspiration and leadership. Tecumseh's War ended only in late 1815 after the British made peace with the United States and abandoned their native allies. Tecumseh's War: The Epic Conflict for the Heart of America (Westholme, 2023) is the first complete story of this major conflict. Distinguished historian Donald R. Hickey detaches it from the War of 1812, moving Tecumseh's confederation to center stage to tell the sweeping and engrossing story of this last great Indian War--the last time that Indigenous Peoples had a powerful European ally to oppose United States expansion and thus the lastchance they had of shaping the future of the continent. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies
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    35 分
  • Rochelle Gurstein, "Written in Water: The Ephemeral Life of the Classic in Art" (Yale UP, 2024)
    2024/10/13
    Is there such a thing as a timeless classic? More than a decade ago, Dr. Rochelle Gurstein set out to explore and establish a solid foundation for the classic in the history of taste. To her surprise, that history instead revealed repeated episodes of soaring and falling reputations, rediscoveries of long-forgotten artists, and radical shifts in the canon, all of which went so completely against common knowledge that it was hard to believe it was true. Where does the idea of the timeless classic come from? And how has it become so fiercely contested? By recovering disputes about works of art from the eighteenth century to the close of the twentieth, in Written in Water: The Ephemeral Life of the Classic in Art (Yale University Press, 2024) Dr. Gurstein takes us into unfamiliar aesthetic and moral terrain, providing a richly imagined historical alternative to accounts offered by both cultural theorists advancing attacks on the politics of taste and those who continue to cling to the ideal of universal values embodied in the classic. As Gurstein brings to life the competing responses of generations of artists, art lovers, and critics to specific works of art, she makes us see the same object vividly and directly through their eyes and feel, in all its enlarging intensity, what they felt. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies
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    1 時間 5 分