A01=Sujit Sivasundaram
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Author_Sujit Sivasundaram
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botany
british rule
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=HBJF
Category=HBLL
Category=HBTM
Category=HBTQ
Category=NHF
Category=NHTM
Category=NHTQ
colonial
colonialism
colony
COP=United States
cultural studies
culture
customs
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
education
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
ethnography
ethnology
geography
governance
governing
government
great britain
imperialism
indian ocean
interactions
island
islanders
islanding
kandy
land
Language_English
manuscript
medicine
migration
PA=Available
politics
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
softlaunch
south asia
sri lanka
state building
subjugation
territorialization
trade
Product details
- ISBN 9780226038223
- Weight: 652g
- Dimensions: 16 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 05 Aug 2013
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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How did the British come to conquer South Asia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? Answers to this question usually start in northern India, neglecting the dramatic events that marked Britain's contemporaneous subjugation of the island of Sri Lanka. In "Islanded", Sujit Sivasundaram reconsiders the arrival of British rule in South Asia as a dynamic and unfinished process of territorialization and state building, revealing that the British colonial project was framed by the island's traditions and maritime placement and built in part on the model they provided. Using palm-leaf manuscripts from Sri Lanka to read the official colonial archive, Sivasundaram tells the story of two sets of islanders in combat and collaboration. He explores how the British organized the process of "islanding," aiming to create a separable unit of colonial governance and trade in keeping with conceptions of ethnology, culture, and geography. But rather than serving as a radical rupture, he reveals, islanding recycled traditions the British learned from Kandy, a kingdom in the Sri Lankan highlands whose customs - from strategies of war to views of nature - fascinated the British.
Picking up a range of unusual themes, from migration, orientalism, and ethnography to botany, medicine, and education, "Islanded" is an engaging retelling of the advent of British rule.
Sujit Sivasundaram is University Lecturer in World and Imperial History since 1500 and fellow of Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge. He is the author of Nature and the Godly Empire: Science and Evangelical Mission in the Pacific, 1795-1850.
