Through a regional focus on Bihar between the 1760s and 1880s, 'Communication and Colonialism in Eastern India' reveals the shifting and contradictory nature of the colonial state's policies and discourses on communication. The volume explores the changing relationship between trade, transport and mobility in India, as evident in the trading and mercantile networks operating at various scales of the economy. Of crucial importance to this study are the ways in which knowledge about roads and routes was collected through practices of travel, tours, surveys, and map-making, all of which benefited the state in its attempts to structure a regime that would regulate 'undesirable' forms of mobility.

A detailed analysis of the way communication became an integral part of colonial governance in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century India.

About the Author

Nitin Sinha is a research fellow at the Zentrum Moderner Orient (Centre for Modern Oriental Studies) in Berlin. His current work focuses on the socio-historical dimensions of the River Ganga in India. He has published on issues of transport and the 'Mutiny' of 1857, mobility and criminality, and railway labour movements in nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial India.

Reviews

'[This is] a book which is not only nuanced and convention challenging, but also successful in simultaneously navigating several strands of historical investigation. There is something in here for the historian of transport, as there is for the historian of cartography, the economic historian and the historian of print culture. [It is] likely to become important reading for scholars of colonial South Asia.' -Amelia Bonea, 'H-Soz-Kult'

Book Information
ISBN 9781783083114
Author Nitin Sinha
Format Paperback
Page Count 310
Imprint Anthem Press
Publisher Anthem Press