Limits of British Colonial Control in South Asia : Spaces of Disorder in the Indian Ocean Region

This book assesses British colonialism in South Asia in a transnational light, with the Indian Ocean region as its ambit, and with a focus on ‘subaltern’ groups and actors. It breaks new ground by combining new strands of research on colonial history. Thinking about colonialism in dynamic terms, the book focuses on the movement of people of the lower orders that imperial ventures generated.

Challenging the assumed stability of colonial rule, the social spaces featured are those that threatened the racial, class and moral order instituted by British colonial states. By elaborating on the colonial state's strategies to control perceived 'disorder' and the modes of resistance and subversion that subaltern subjects used to challenge state control, a picture of British Empire as an ultimately precarious, shifting and unruly formation is presented, which is quite distinct from its self-projected image as an orderly entity.

Thoroughly researched and innovative in its approach, this book will be a valuable resource for scholars of Asian, British imperial/colonial, transnational and international history.

Ashwini Tambe is Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada. Her research interests include gender and sexuality in South Asia, colonial history and globalization, and specifically the history of the sex trade in colonial Bombay.

Harald Fischer-Tiné is Professor of History at Jacobs University, Bremen. He holds a PhD in South Asian History from Heidelberg University (2000) and has published extensively on the social and cultural history of the British Raj and varieties of Hindu reform and Hindu nationalism in 19th and 20th century India.