Civilizing Natures: Race, Resources, and Modernity in Colonial South India - Hardcover

Philip, Kavita

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0813533600 ISBN 13: 9780813533605

Publisher: Rutgers University Press, 2004

Synopsis

Science was a central pillar of colonialism, but the converse holds true as well: colonialism profoundly shaped the character of nineteenth-century science. Civilizing Natures unravels unexpected relationships between science, technology, and administrative systems in colonial India from the 1850s to the 1930s, deepening our perspective on continuing conflicts over race, resources, and empire.

Botanists, anthropologists, and foresters had their most important sources of data—nature and natives—located at colonial sites. In the hilly, forested regions of Madras Presidency, tribal populations were studied by ethnographers, managed by revenue officials, recruited by plantation contractors, and modernized by missionaries. Racial constructions of nature and modernity helped criminalize and domesticate unruly natives. This is a story about the construction of nature in southern India that is deeply local and irreducibly global.

Through detailed case studies, Kavita Philip shows how race and nature are fundamental to understanding colonial modernities. Through its insightful combination of methodologies from both the humanities and the social sciences, Civilizing Natures complicates our understandings of the relationships between science and religion, pre-modern and civilized, environment and society.

 

About this title

About the Author:

Kavita Philip is the co-author (with Terry Harpold) of Going Native: Cyberculture and Millennial Fantasies of Globalization, and co-editor of Constructing Human Rights in the Age of Globalization. She is an associate professor at the University of California, Irvine.

Review:

"What an extraordinary case study....Kavita Philip shows how in a colonial world every aspect, including the environment, becomes a contested space. Readable and insightful, it is the perfect investigation for any class from colonial studies to environmental studies to the history of science and technology."

About this edition

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0813533600
• ISBN 13: 9780813533605
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 248