A01=Andrew Stephen Sartori
agrarian
agrarian discourse
asian history
Author_Andrew Stephen Sartori
bengal
berkeley series in british studies
british empire
british history
british imperialism
capitalism
Category=NHD
Category=NHF
Category=NHTQ
colonial bengal
colonialism
commodity exchange
empire
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
european empire
european imperialism
freedom
great britain
history of liberalism
imperialism
indian history
liberal policy
liberal policy makers
liberalism
ownership
peasant independence
peasant property
political
politics
power of labor
property
retrospective
revolution
social relations
Product details
- ISBN 9780520281691
- Weight: 408g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 03 Jul 2014
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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While the need for a history of liberalism that goes beyond its conventional European limits is well recognized, the agrarian backwaters of the British Empire might seem an unlikely place to start. Yet specifically liberal preoccupations with property and freedom evolved as central to agrarian policy and politics in colonial Bengal. Liberalism in Empire explores the generative crisis in understanding property's role in the constitution of a liberal polity, which intersected in Bengal with a new politics of peasant independence based on practices of commodity exchange. Thus the conditions for a new kind of vernacular liberalism were created. Andrew Sartori's examination shows the workings of a section of liberal policy makers and agrarian leaders who insisted that norms governing agrarian social relations be premised on the property-constituting powers of labor, which opened a new conceptual space for appeals to both political economy and the normative significance of property. It is conventional to see liberalism as traveling through the space of empire with the extension of colonial institutions and intellectual networks.
Sartori's focus on the Lockeanism of agrarian discourses of property, however, allows readers to grasp how liberalism could serve as a normative framework for both a triumphant colonial capitalism and a critique of capitalism from the standpoint of peasant property.
Andrew Sartori is Associate Professor of History at NYU, author of Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital (2008), and coeditor (with Samuel Moyn) of Global Intellectual History (2013).
