Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Eighteenth century India'
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Umar, Muhammad. "Islam in Northern India during the eighteenth century /." New Delhi : Munshiram Manoharlal publ, 1993. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb374828727.
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Cover, Jennifer Joy. "Bodhasara by Narahari: An Eighteenth Century Sanskrit Treasure." University of Sydney, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/4085.
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PhDBodhasāra, previously untranslated into English, is a Sanskrit treasure. Written by Narahari in eighteenth century India, it consists of charming Sanskrit verse of the highest order. Full of metaphors and word puns, it is a clever piece of literature that stimulates the intellect and imagination. By carefully following the traditional protocols, Bodhasāra remains acceptable to orthodox Advaita Vedāntins. However, although superficially it appears to be merely another presentation of the Advaita Vedānta tradition, in-depth reading reveals a refreshingly new style. The Hindu tradition is poetically presented as invaluable to awaken discernment between the real and unreal, but the import of Bodhasāra is that, ultimately, liberation requires a maturity that is not bound by anything, including the tradition itself; it comes through an awakening discernment. Narahari is celebrating jīvanmukti, not as liberation from the world, but as liberation while living. Bodhasāra is stylishly poetic, but not poetry for poetry’s sake, nor bhakti (religious devotion); rather it exemplifies the potency of rasa (aesthetic flavour) and dhvani (aesthetic suggestion). Narahari understands the correspondence between words and truth and uses his poetic style to facilitate union of the individual and universal. Few eighteenth century Sanskrit works have even been read, let alone translated into English, so this translation of Bodhasāra is a valuable example of Indian thought immediately before Colonialism. It shows what modernity, defined here as a moving away from entrenched traditional beliefs to an empowerment of the individual living in the present moment, in an Indian context could have been like if Colonialism had not intervened. The implications of Bodhasāra to scholars of Indian history, Advaita Vedānta and Yoga need to be considered. Bodhasāra extends the project ‘Sanskrit knowledge systems on the eve of colonialism’ being a work on mokṣa written in the late eighteenth century. It revitalises academic research into Advaita Vedānta, presents a fresh view of Yoga, and fits well the notion of an Indian modernity or renaissance during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.
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Raza, Rosemary. "British women writers on India between mid-eighteenth century and 1857." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.285448.
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Datta, Rajat. "Rural Bengal : social structure and agrarian economy in the late eighteenth century." Thesis, King's College London (University of London), 1990. https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/rural-bengal--social-structure-and-agrarian-economy-in-the-late-eighteenth-century(c3fd3fb9-688c-4a22-ba0c-d5fa3322296e).html.
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Khan, Gulfishan. "Indian Muslim perceptions of the West during the eighteenth century." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1993. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:dacf23d8-28f4-40da-b781-4e7cb940828b.
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The present thesis, entitled "Indian Muslim Perceptions of the West during the Eighteenth century", deals with Muslim images of the West at the turn of the eighteenth century as they were formulated in the minds of Indian Muslim intellectuals. It examines the modalities of experience and categories of knowledge of the West as they were perceived by Muslim scholars who had come into contact with the contemporary West. The main purpose of the present enquiry is to analyze the origins and the nature of such perceptions as were articulated in their writings. With the expansion of British political power in the sub-continent in the late eighteenth century Britain came to be identified with Europe as a whole in the minds of our intellectuals. The Indian intelligentsia's experience of the contemporary Western civilization became in fact its experience of the British society and culture. Extensive quotations from the writings of the authors under consideration are often used to illustrate the principal arguments in this essay. The thesis is based on relatively unexplored source-material which comprises Persian manuscripts in the Bodleian Library in Oxford and the British Library in London. Our writers' perceptions of the Western civilization concentrate on various aspects of European and, particularly, British culture such as social life, religion, political ideas and institutions and scientific and technological developments. The present study also attempts to assess the impact of an alien culture on various socio-economic levels in Indian society, especially since Muslims had largely lost a centralised political control over India. The declining Muslim intelligentsia accepted uncritically the impact of the new and powerful culture but the new knowledge presented in their writings was not significantly implemented in their society; rather, the indigenous society was overwhelmed by the new culture that was imposed upon it and gave in to it and its attraction.
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Stringer, George P. "Tilly Kettle's portraiture and the art of identity in eighteenth-century Britain and India." Thesis, Keele University, 2018. http://eprints.keele.ac.uk/5189/.
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This thesis examines the work of Tilly Kettle (1735-1786), the first professional British artist to work in India, and focuses on his portraiture in a quarter-century that saw Britain defeat European rivals during the Seven Years’ War, gain India, and lose America. One of an emergent group of artists responsible for creating a British school of portraiture, Kettle has never received a great deal of credit for his achievement, especially from art historians. Aside from J.D. Milner’s monograph in 1927, there has been no biographical appraisal of Kettle, who left no known writings but was a prolific artist, working in nonmetropolitan locations that have also received limited scholarly attention. This study uses Kettle’s paintings, primary evidence and newly discovered material to show how personal, artistic or national identities were being unsettled, reformed or re-framed during his day, and contends that portraiture reflected and impelled these changes, with social and cultural attitudes co-policed by empirical observation and aesthetic distinction. My analysis of Kettle’s artworks, the circumstances of their creation, and what can be inferred of his experience will relate him to these processes of identity formation, showing that he helped to shape debates as well as being controlled by them. In particular, I examine how his work influenced or echoed the motives behind national and imperial expansion. Kettle’s identity is seen as a three-part social construct: as a self-reflexive individual, as a national subject, and as a professional artist. My study timeframe allows a parallel view of history from Kettle’s perspective, connecting his key portraits with issues and events, from miraculous victories in 1759 to shock after American triumph in 1783. I conclude that Kettle’s art and career reflect an unfinished artistic self, patriotic but defensive, driven by the vagaries of taste, ambition and progress, and the futility of empire.
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Gaiero, Andrew. "Enlightened Dissent: The Voices of Anti-Imperialism in Eighteenth Century Britain." Thesis, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/34962.
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This dissertation explores and analyzes anti-imperial sentiments in Britain throughout the long eighteenth century. During this period of major British state formation and imperial expansion, there were a surprisingly large number of observers who voiced notable and varied concerns and opposition towards numerous overseas ventures, yet who have not since received significant attention within the historical record. Indeed, many critics of British imperialism and empire-building, from within Britain itself, formed extensive and thoughtful assessments of their own nation’s conduct in the world. Criticism ranged widely, from those who opposed the high economic costs of imperial expansion to those worried that a divine retribution would rain down upon Britain for injustices committed by Britons abroad. Such diversity of anti-imperial perspectives came from a clearly enlightened minority, whose limited influences upon broader public opinions had little effect on policies at the time. Successive British administrations and self-interested Britons who sought their fortunes and adventures abroad, often with little regard for the damage inflicted on those whom they encountered, won the political debate over empire-building. However, in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, the perspectives of many of these individuals would increasingly become highly regarded. Later generations of reformers, particularly “Little Englanders”, or classical liberals and radicals, would look back reverently to these critics to draw inspiration for refashioning the empire and Britain’s position in the world. These eighteenth century ideas continued to present powerful counter-arguments to the trends then in place and served to inspire those, in the centuries that followed, who sought to break the heavy chains of often despotic colonial rule and mitigate the ravages of war and conquest.
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Gude, Tushara Bindu. "Between music and history Rāgamālā paintings and European collectors in late eighteenth-century northern India /." Diss., Restricted to subscribing institutions, 2009. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=2023838261&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=1564&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Jacobs, Els M. "Merchant in Asia : the trade of the Dutch East India Company during the eighteenth century /." Leiden : Research School CNWS, 2006. http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/fy0712/2007385439.html.
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Smith, Blake. "Myths of Stasis : south Asia, Global Commerce and Economic Orientalism in Late Eighteenth-Century France." Thesis, Paris, EHESS, 2017. http://www.theses.fr/2017EHES0043.
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Cette thèse analyse la place de l'Inde et des échanges commerciales franco-indiennes dans l'élaboration en la France du dix-huitième siècle de la notion orientaliste que l'Asie n'est pas capable des progrès économiquesThis thesis examines the place of India and of Franco-Indian commercial exchange in the construction in eighteenth-century France of the Orientalist conception that Asia is incapable of economic progress
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Patterson, Jessica. "Enlightenment, Empire and Deism : interpretations of the 'Hindoo religion' in the work of East India 'Company Men', 1760-1790." Thesis, University of Manchester, 2017. https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/enlightenment-empire-and-deism-interpretations-of-the-hindoo-religion-in-the-work-of-east-india-company-men-17601790(f0f58aea-f425-4f0b-8407-7963e95beef8).html.
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In the latter half of the eighteenth century the British presence in India meant that East India Company servants were at the forefront of European researches into the region's history, culture and religion. This thesis offers an analysis of the work of four such Company writers, all of whom produced accounts of what they perceived to be India's native and original religion: J.Z. Holwell (1711-1798), Alexander Dow, (1735-1779), N.B. Halhed (1751-1830), and Charles Wilkins (1749-1836). It argues that their particular interpretation of what they termed the 'Hindoo' or 'Gentoo' religion was based on their own preoccupations with European religious debates, from a perspective that can loosely be described as deist. At the centre of this thesis is the claim that these British interpretations of Hinduism instigated an important shift in the way that Indian theology and philosophy was understood in eighteenth-century Europe. This new paradigm moved away from characterisations of the religion according to eye-witness accounts, towards a construction of Indian religion based on the claim of British researchers that they were penetrating the original philosophical origins of a much maligned and ancient system of thought. This new interpretation of a philosophic Hinduism was both based in and shaped Enlightenment intellectual culture, to the extent that by the turn of the century it had firmly cemented its place in not only the thought of prominent figures such as Voltaire and Raynal, but also constituted a significant topic in the emergent discourses of German idealism. The notion of a British interpretation of Hinduism has previously been discussed as both a marker in what some have termed the invention of Hinduism, and by those researching the history of Orientalism as an academic discipline. In the first instance, these authors are characterised as moments in a process, with some suggesting that the real invention occurred as part of the nineteenth-century imperialist project. In the second place, these authors are most often seen as unscholarly precursors to the work of the first true British Indologist, Sir William Orientalist Jones (1746-1794). This thesis will challenge these positions by positing these four authors as the architects of the shift towards a European conception of Hinduism as a rational and philosophical religion.
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Stanworth, Karen. "Historical relations : representing collective identities: small group portraiture in eighteenth-century England, British India and America." Thesis, University of Manchester, 1994. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.549179.
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In this thesis I seek to challenge the authority of the visual narrative implied in small group portraiture in order to open up the apparent clarity of the depicted relations of the sitters to each other and to their place. The mediating role of territorial or boundaried constraints is questioned, particularly the ways in which political or gendered lines of demarcation serve to delimit the potentially unlimited narrative of the group. The objects of my research were chosen according to the time and place of production, and not in respect to any predetermined hierarchy of artistic excellence. The images are the products of diverse situations, places, and periods. Moving diachronically through the century, I look first at the early appearances of the mode as practised by Gawen Hamilton and William Hogarth. This is followed by a consideration of the significance of gender and class in the construction of storytelling around the small group portrait. In the next chapter, I examine the role of contested boundaries --personal, political and religious --- in the production of several portraits realised in 1780s British India. The final chapter focuses upon the rhetoric of familial and political representation in the portrait of George Washington and his family. The inherent characteristics of the genre, first identified in England as a 'conversation' or conversationpiece, were aligned with a widespread concern for conversational strategies in general during the 1720s and 30s. A close reading of George Vertue's comments about conversations suggests a different version of the historiographic account of the genre in that I find that the artists were praised by their contemporaries, vertue in particular, for their ability to visually re-present those desired strategies. If the genre can be understood as an historically-specific practice, as Vertue's remarks would suggest, then the continued utilisation of the mode through the century begs the question of whether there is likewise a mediating or constituting presence of local realities in the represented relations of the sitters. The particularity of small group portraiture in eighteenth-century English homes, whether in England, British India, or America resides both in the genre-based differences between group and individual portraiture, and in the visualisation of historicallyspecific narratives of the group
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Patel, Sachi (Sunit). "Politics and religion in eighteenth-century North India : the rise of public theology in Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2018. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:d58d52d0-b6aa-4274-a4ae-8ff5cb5aac38.
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Despite the prolific authorship within the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava tradition, it had not produced a single text that addresses the theological basis for engagement with public or social systems, nor any that offer guidance or insight into how a practitioner might behave or integrate into such environments. Nor have they in any substantial way referred to politically orientated texts such as the Dharma-śāstras. The tradition's most prominent texts relate instead to philosophical expositions on themes such as bhakti rasa or devotional aesthetic sentiments. However, in the early-eighteenth century, we notice an intriguing phenomenon, suddenly a series of works are fashioned to rationalize and promote a system of integration with the socio-political circumstances of their time. This fascinating period within Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava history witnesses the production of specialized treatises that provide theological foundations to endorse and encourage responsible public conduct grounded on notions such as karma and varṇāśrama. This thesis adopts a two-fold approach, the close reading and examination of this new genre of Sanskrit based works, alongside reviewing the contemporary context these works emerge in. The political maneuverings of this historical era became a critical factor in invoking the production of these texts, and consequently these works reflect the interests and concerns of Jaisingh II, the ruler of a precolonial North Indian polity, the Kachvāhā dynasty. The texts were specific tools employed by the tradition to address the apparently contradictory mandate to reconcile responsible public engagement with the esoteric transcendent nature of bhakti practices, formulating a public theology which placed at its center bhakti practice. Through examining this innovation, I extract the perspectives from four critical figures in this period, king Jaisingh II, and Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava scholars Viśvanātha, Kṛṣṇadeva and Baladeva, enabling me to gain a comprehensive understanding of the exact nature of public theology for this tradition in this compelling era.
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Mayer, Tara. "Clothing and the imperial image : European dress, identity and authority in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century North India." Thesis, SOAS, University of London, 2010. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.572826.
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Thompson, Iva Marie. "Exploring The Influence of Burkean Aesthetics on Late Eighteenth-Century British Representations of India and North America." OpenSIUC, 2013. https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/dissertations/765.
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This dissertation examines how several British novelists--Elizabeth Hamilton, Phebe Gibbes, Sydney Owenson, Frances Brooke, Unca Eliza Winkfield, Charlotte Smith, and Robert Bage--were actively redeveloping a political aesthetic theory for the late eighteenth-century by using the landscape of India and North America to discuss Britain, her policies, and her political leaders. These writers applied Edmund Burke's notions of the sublime and beautiful to India and North America as a way to discuss shifting social, cultural, and political views as well as watershed moments such as the Hastings trial. A comparative, multi-themed study of these writers' work is beneficial (if not necessary) to our understanding of the cultural complexities of British colonialism in this era. This dissertation offers new insights upon how colonial politics and Burkean aesthetics were rhetorically deployed in the late eighteenth century. It also actively participates in the recovery process for several novelists whose work has only recently begun to receive critical attention. My study does not focus on these novelists as marginal writers, but as authors (much like Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Thomas Paine) who were actively involved in the politics of their time and whose novels serve as vehicles for dialogue on both domestic and foreign policy. The novels of Hamilton, Gibbes, Owenson, Winkfield, Brooke, Bage, and Smith contain numerous conflicting descriptions of India in which the landscape is described as both sublime (masculine) and beautiful (feminine). I contend that the conflicting nature of these descriptions reflects Burke's own varying portrayals of India, questions his rhetorical style, and employs his own aesthetic theory to mock his shifting political and cultural views. Nor is it only Burke's rhetorical style and strategies that these authors explore and critique, but the very nature of political oratory itself.
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Chartrand, Alix Geneviève. "The evolution of British imperial perceptions in Ireland and India, c. 1650-1800." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2019. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/288788.
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This dissertation explores the correlation between British colonial experiences in Ireland and India c. 1650 - 1800. While the traditional characterisation of Ireland as a settlement colony and India as primarily a mercantile colony would suggest diverse imperial encounters, a comparative analysis of the two shows significant similarities. Temporal and/or geographical distances notwithstanding, the study's thematic approach reveals recurring patterns regarding the relationships between colonisers and the colonised. The six chapters of this dissertation explore different elements of empire, concluding that comparable socio-political and agrarian principles were consistently implemented in both colonies. The first chapter explores history writing as a tool of historical appropriation and indigenous reconfiguration. The second looks at escalating legal responses to colonial violence and colonial jurisdiction's role in defining social norms; the third considers the evolving forms of punishment dealt to 'deviant' colonial subjects. The fourth chapter looks at similar processes of agrarian reconfiguration that revealed broader imperial attitudes towards landownership and the fifth one elaborates on the use of visual representations of empire as propaganda tools to shape public opinion. In the final chapter, selected experiences of the Irish in India illustrate examples of colonial subjects' collaboration in imperial expansion. By adopting a more heuristic and thematic approach to colonial experiences, this study adds to the growing literature that necessarily complicates the distinctions between metropole and periphery. It challenges the use of single points of reference which have routinely privileged the accounts and experiences of Britons in the scholarly analysis of cross-cultural and imperial interactions. Blending early modern and nineteenth-century experiences with regional and global history, the chapters address the history of emotions, law, material culture, economy, and politics to argue that processes of influence and transformation were indicative of a more layered and evolutionary development in response to colonial challenges. Such experimental approaches provide a more sustained understanding of the processes of continuity and change in Britain's imperial evolution.
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Pruett, David Alan. "Writing the life of the self: constructions of identity in autobiographical discourse by six eighteenth-century American Indians." Diss., Texas A&M University, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/447.
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The invasion of the Western Hemisphere by empire-building Europeans brought European forms of rhetoric to the Americas. American Indians who were exposed to European-style education gradually adopted some of the cultural ways of the invaders, including rhetorical forms and operations that led, via literacy in European languages, to autobiographical writing, historical consciousness, and literary self-representation. This dissertation uses rhetorical criticism to analyze autobiographical discourse of six eighteenth-century American Indian writers: Samuel Ashpo, Hezekiah Calvin, David Fowler, Joseph Johnson, Samson Occom, and Tobias Shattock. Their texts are rhetorically interrelated through several circumstances: all of these men were educated in a missionary school; most of them probably learned to read and write in English at the school; they left the school and worked as teachers and Christian missionaries to Indians, sharing similar obstacles and successes in their work; and they are Others on whom their teacher, Eleazar Wheelock, inscribed European culture. The six Indian writers appropriate language and tropes of the encroaching Euro-American culture in order to define themselves in relation to that culture and make their voices heard. They participated in European colonial culture by responding iv to, and co-creating, rhetorical situations. While the Indians' written discourse and the situations that called forth their writing have been examined and discussed through a historical lens, critiques of early American Indian autobiography that make extensive use of rhetorical analysis are rare. Thus this dissertation offers a long-overdue treatment of rhetoric in early American Indian autobiography and opens the way to rhetorical readings of autobiography by considering the early formation of the genre in a cross-cultural context.
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Hall, Amanda A. "San Antonio de Pocotalaca: An Eighteenth-Century Yamasee Indian Town in St. Augustine, Florida, 1716-1752." UNF Digital Commons, 2016. http://digitalcommons.unf.edu/etd/619.
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Following the Yamasee War of 1715, many of the Yamasee Indians rekindled alliances with the Spanish and returned to La Florida. San Antonio de Pocotalaca (1716 to 1752) was one of three initial Yamasee Indian towns to relocate from South Carolina and settle on the fringes of St. Augustine. In South Carolina, Pocotalaca (referred to there as Pocotaligo) served as the primary upper town of six Yamasee towns and was the political center for conferences and council meetings between Yamasees, their Indian allies, and South Carolina officials. When Pocotalaca relocated to St. Augustine after the Yamasee War, the town and its inhabitants retained their political significance. Having recognized the importance of the town’s Yamasees, their connections to Indian groups in Apalachicola, and how the alliance could be beneficial to the colony, the Spanish treated them accordingly. As a result, Pocotalaca’s Yamasees secured influence and continued to so by bolstering power through their relations with the Spanish. For these reasons, they were able to carve out their own space in St. Augustine where they retained a high level of autonomy, maintained their Yamasee identity, some traditional practices, and many aspects in their material choices.
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Harris, Eleanor M. "The Episcopal congregation of Charlotte Chapel, Edinburgh, 1794-1818." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/19991.
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This thesis reassesses the nature and importance of the Scottish Episcopal Church in Edinburgh and more widely. Based on a microstudy of one chapel community over a twenty-four year period, it addresses a series of questions of religion, identity, gender, culture and civic society in late Enlightenment Edinburgh, Scotland, and Britain, combining ecclesiastical, social and economic history. The study examines the congregation of Charlotte Episcopal Chapel, Rose Street, Edinburgh, from its foundation by English clergyman Daniel Sandford in 1794 to its move to the new Gothic chapel of St John's in 1818. Initially an independent chapel, Daniel Sandford's congregation joined the Scottish Episcopal Church in 1805 and the following year he was made Bishop of Edinburgh, although he contined to combine this role with that of rector to the chapel until his death in 1830. Methodologically, the thesis combines a detailed reassessment of Daniel Sandford's thought and ministry (Chapter Two) with a prosopographical study of 431 individuals connected with the congregation as officials or in the in the chapel registers (Chapter Three). Biography of the leader and prosopography of the community are brought to illuminate and enrich one another to understand the wealth and business networks of the congregation (Chapter Four) and their attitudes to politics, piety and gender (Chapter Five). The thesis argues that Daniel Sandford's Evangelical Episcopalianism was both original in Scotland, and one of the most successful in appealing to educated and influential members of Edinburgh society. The congregation, drawn largely from the newly-built West End of Edinburgh, were bourgeois and British in their composition. The core membership of privileged Scots, rooted in land and law, led, but were also challenged by and forced to adapt to a broad social spread who brought new wealth and influence into the West End through India and the consumer boom. The discussion opens up many avenues for further research including the connections between Scottish Episcopalianism and romanticism, the importance of India and social mobility within the consumer economy in the development of Edinburgh, and Scottish female intellectual culture and its engagement with religion and enlightenment. Understanding the role of enlightened, evangelical Episcopalianism, which is the contribution of this study, will form an important context for these enquiries.
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Gobin, Anuradha. "Leaving a bittersweet taste : classifying, cultivating and consuming sugar in seventeenth and eighteenth century British West Indian visual culture." Thesis, McGill University, 2007. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=112338.
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This thesis explores visual representations of British West Indian sugar in relation to the African slave trade practiced during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During this time, sugar played a vital role to the lives of both European and non-Europeans as it was a source of great wealth for many and became transformed into one of the most demanded and widely consumed commodity. From the earliest days of British colonization, the cultivation and production of sugar in the Caribbean has been inextricably linked with the trade in African slaves to provide free labor for plantation owners and planters. This thesis considers how European artists visually represented sugar in its various forms---as an object for botanical study, as landscape and as consumable commodity---and in so doing, constructed specific ideas about the African slave body and the use of African slave labor that reflected personal and imperial agendas and ideologies.
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Wallace, Jessica Lynn. ""Building Forts in Their Heart": Anglo-Cherokee Relations on the Mid-Eighteenth-Century Southern Frontier." The Ohio State University, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1404334391.
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Forestier, Albane. "Commercial organization in the late eighteenth century Atlantic world : a comparative analysis of the British and French West Indian trades." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 2009. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.511790.
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Downing, Brandon C. "“`An Extream Bad Collection of Broken Innkeepers, Horse Jockeys, and Indian Traders’: How Anarchy, Violence, and Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Pennsylvania Transformed Provincial Society”." University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1423580910.
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Keshani, Hussein. "The architecture of ritual : eighteenth-century Lucknow and the making of the Great Imambarah complex, a forgotten world monument." Thesis, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/1828/7939.
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In the late eighteenth century, a large urban redevelopment program was initiated by the
Shii Isna ‘Ashari Muslim ruler Asaf al-Dawlah in Lucknow, a city located in the
prosperous, semi-autonomous north Indian region of Awadh. The development included
four monumental entrances, a congregational mosque and a monumental imambarah, a
ritual centre used for the annual mourning of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Husayn
by the city’s small, elite Shii Isna community. Incorporating one of the largest
masonry vaults ever built in human history, the imambarah has a monumental scale that
contributes to its uniqueness. Although Shii Isna ‘Ashari communities elsewhere
developed smaller imambarah facilities, none ever thought to build one using
monumental proportions typically reserved for congregational mosques. Asaf al-Dawlah’s Great Imambarah is unusual in the history of world architecture and in Shii Isna ‘Ashari, Islamic religious practice, but the building and complex have never been the focus of study.Graduate
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Dudney, Arthur. "A Desire for Meaning: Ḳhān-i Ārzū's Philology and the Place of India in the Eighteenth-Century Persianate World." Thesis, 2013. https://doi.org/10.7916/D84Q82BV.
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During the early-modern period, Persian was the language of the imperial court and a prestigious literary medium in South Asia. Not only did Persian connect the Subcontinent with intellectual and cultural trends across western and central Asia, but during the early-modern period, India--even compared with Iran--was arguably the world's main center for the patronage of Persian literature and scholarship. However, our understanding of the societal role of Indo-Persian (that is, Persian used in South Asia) is still hazy in part because the end of Persian as a language of power in India has been so historiographically over-determined. Colonial intellectuals and nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalists in Iran and India have claimed that by the eighteenth century Indo-Persian had become an artificial, ossified tradition in decline, symptomatic of a political system in decline, whose ineluctable destiny was to be replaced by supposedly more democratic and properly Indian languages like Hindi and Urdu. The present study seeks to nuance and in some cases to completely revise this declinist narrative through an examination of eighteenth-century primary sources. This dissertation traces the development of philology (the study of literary language, known in Persian under several names including 'ilm-i lughat) within the Indo-Persian tradition, concentrating on its social and political ramifications, and the modes by which Indo-Persian writers smoothed the way for the adoption of the vernacular in contexts formerly reserved for Persian. The eighteenth century is a hinge between the pre-modern and the colonial modern, and yet our understanding of the intellectual history of that century is much poorer than for the colonial period. The most prolific and arguably most influential Indo-Persian philologist of the early-modern period was Siraj al-Din 'Ali Khan (1687/8-1756), whose nom de plume was Arzu. Besides being a much-admired poet in Persian and Urdu, Arzu was a rigorous theoretician of language. Arzu's conception of language accounted for literary innovation and historical change, a project whose newness he acknowledges and which was necessary in the face of the tazah go'i [literally, "fresh speaking"] movement in Persian literature. Although later scholarship has tended to frame this debate in anachronistically nationalist terms (Iranians versus Indians), the primary sources complicate the picture. The present study draws an analogy to the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in Europe to show that the contemporary concern had far less to do with geography than with the question of how to interpret innovative "fresh speaking" poetry (just as in Europe the concern had been over assessing the value of texts not modeled on the Classics). Arzu used historical reasoning to argue that as a cosmopolitan language Persian could not be the property of one nation and be subject to one narrow kind of interpretation. In doing so he carefully defined the differences in usage within the Persian cosmopolis, and concluded that Indo-Persian usage was within the norms of Persian usage generally, meaning that properly educated Indians had as much right as Iranian native speakers to innovate in Persian. An intervention offered by the present research is the recognition that Arzu's theories, which superficially seem to concern only Persian, apply to language more generally. A study of his work can therefore elucidate the mechanisms that allowed Urdu to gain acceptance in elite literary circles in northern India during his lifetime. An often-overlooked aspect of intellectual history, both in India and in the West, is that advances in vernacular literary culture have usually come about not through a repudiation of the classics and their language but rather through a sustained engagement with them by bilingual writers. By changing attitudes about rekhtah, a Persianized form of vernacular composition that would later be renamed and reconceptualized as Urdu, Arzu defined and systematized vernacular literary production. Furthermore, this study presents a challenge to the persistent misconception that Indians started writing Urdu because they were ashamed of their poor Persian.
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Bae, Kyoungjin. "Joints of Utility, Crafts of Knowledge: the Material Culture of the Sino-British Furniture Trade during the Long Eighteenth Century." Thesis, 2016. https://doi.org/10.7916/D8GX4BR6.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation examines the material culture of the Sino-British furniture trade in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the beginning of the eighteenth century, the British East India Company began importing a large quantity of furniture made in Canton (Guangzhou), China. As the trade between Britain and China became standardized around 1720, this furniture became a part of the private trade carried out by merchants associated with Company. Unlike other objects of the China trade that fed into the vogue of chinoiserie, export furniture crafted with hardwoods from the Indian Ocean was produced in European designs of the time and thus was often indistinguishable from its Western counterparts. What cultural and economic values did export furniture represent in the early modern maritime trade and how did it reify the trans-regional movement of knowledge and taste between China and Britain? Going beyond the conventional perspective on export Chinese objects oriented toward European reception, I connect production with consumption in order to follow the trajectory of export furniture from its origins in the intra-Asian timber trade to its requisition and manufacture in Canton to its reception and use in both Britain and China, highlighting how this process linked the disparate spheres of commerce, knowledge production and distribution, and cultural practices. In the course of exploring these multiple dimensions of the object’s material life, this dissertation underscores export furniture’s bicultural and transcultural characteristics.
Utilizing diverse sets of visual, material, and textual sources, each chapter of the dissertation investigates different aspects of the movement of furniture as an assemblage. Chapter 1 reconstructs the itinerary of export furniture as a commodity from the EIC timber trade between India and China to the ordering and shipping of the furniture for the British market. I show how the character of export furniture was shaped by the constraints of space and the economic, environmental, and epistemic contingencies of long distance travel and communication. Chapter 2 examines the influence of imported Asian rosewood – an important cabinet timber from which most hardwood Chinese export furniture was made – on early modern British arboreal knowledge. If the knowledge of rosewood in the seventeenth century was grounded in classical texts that defined it as a subshrub growing in the eastern Mediterranean region, in the eighteenth century the term came to refer to a hardwood species imported from tropical Asia. I argue that this change allowed rosewood to obtain a new status as a universal category in the botanical taxonomy, which collected, pruned, and ordered heterogeneous cultural and natural information associated with it into a neatly classified “cabinet” of universal knowledge.
Chapter 3 returns to Canton to investigate Cantonese cabinetmakers and the production of export furniture. By reading the joinery of extant export furniture pieces, I show how Chinese artisans recreated foreign forms by mobilizing their embodied knowledge of craft rather than by imitating European joinery constructions. The details of this material translation not only reflect the flexibility and resilience of traditional Chinese craft but also illuminate the tacit knowledge and craft patterns of early modern Chinese artisans. Chapters 4 and 5 turn to the domain of consumption in Britain and China, respectively. Chapter 4 explores how Chinese cabinets were experienced in early modern Britain. Comparing lacquered and hardwood display cabinets, I show that Chinese cabinets were not just exotic objects; they played an active role in the evolution of the cabinet as a type of furniture in the domestic material culture and created an affective space both within themselves and in their ambient space that invited the bodily experience and imagination of the user-beholder. The final chapter examines the movement and adaptation of European round tables in mid-Qing Chinese material culture. Introduced by European mariners to Canton, the round tables quickly found their niche in local everyday life and eventually spread beyond Guangdong. I show how they partook in the formation of a new social dining practice that conveyed a new political vision of equality. As a whole, my dissertation argues that export furniture was a Eurasian object that embodied cross-cultural knowledge of craft and nature, and engendered new ideas of utility and sociability.
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"Indian and French interaction in colonial Louisiana during the early eighteenth century." Tulane University, 2000.
Find full textAbstract:
Although historic documents indicate extensive interaction between French and Native Americans at initial contact, little is known about French influence on native groups, native influence on the French colonists, or about the nature of their relations in general. One means of investigating these questions is through examination of settlement patterning and evidence of acculturation as indicated by items of material culture recovered through archaeological investigations in southwestern Alabama. where the earliest sustained contact took place. In 1702 the town of Mobile was constructed and settled by the French to serve as the heart of their Louisiana colony. The study of this original French settlement and other French period sites in the surrounding area has provided an ideal situation for investigating French-Indian contact. Specifically. this research explores how the French presence affected aboriginal settlement and examines ceramic function and style as an indicator of acculturation A model about the nature of congregated minority groups in contact situations is developed through the investigation of archaeological and historical data for this region of earliest sustained contact on the Gulf Coast. In addition, it is suggested that while cultural exchange was affecting French and Native Americans in many respects. their structures remain distinct and can be determined archaeologically by considering factors such as structure location, size, building techniques, length of occupation, and proportions of artifact classes. This investigation provides new and valuable information concerning the effect of initial French colonization on aboriginal settlement patterning and acculturation in the Gulf regionacase@tulane.edu
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Smith, Erica. "Something more than mere ornament : cloth and Indian-European relationships in the eighteenth century." 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/1993/3631.
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This thesis took root when my advisor Jennifer Brown handed me a recent publication entitled Cloth and Human Experience, a collection of anthropological, art historical, and ethnographic approaches to the functions of cloth in various societies. The text were multivocal but united on one theme: the conviction that cloth, clothing and adornment are central to the historical study of human relationships, past and present. Cloth's significance in Northern Algonquian societies remained to be seen, but a preliminary reading of the primary sources revealed that of the dozens of European commodities sent to the Hudson's Bay Company posts during the eighteenth century, cloth was a persistent best-se11er. Many scholars are now recognizing that the fur trade was not just about trading European goods for furs but an interactive process more complex and dynamic than was previously realized. Francis and Morantz and Bruce White, for example, have concluded that the fur trade was a process of human interaction in which the exchange of goods was a symbol for a much wider set of contacts between Indian and white traders. For the purposes of this thesis, the category cloth includes ready-made items such as coats, handkerchiefs, hats and shirts and blankets; and decorative materials like lace, ribbons and gartering. Flags are considered to be a special kind of ceremonial cloth. The aboriginal groups of most interest here are the Cree and Ojibwa, two branches of the Northern Algonquian peoples of the eastern subarctic who occupied the regions between western Hudson Bay, the Great Lakes and the Lake Winnipeg basin. As much as possible, I have tried to specify which groups were indicated, although the task was complicated by the fact that they were commonly regarded as interchangeable in company records...
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Seastrand, Anna Lise. "Praise, Politics, and Language: South Indian Murals, 1500-1800." Thesis, 2013. https://doi.org/10.7916/D8ZS2WJB.
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This study of mural painting in southern India aims to change the received narrative of painting in South Asia not only by bringing to light a body of work previously understudied and in many cases undocumented, but by showing how that corpus contributes vitally to the study of South Indian art and history. At the broadest level, this dissertation reworks our understanding of a critical moment in South Asian history that has until recently been seen as a period of decadence, setting the stage for the rise of colonial power in South Asia. Militating against the notion of decline, I demonstrate the artistic, social, and political dynamism of this period by documenting and analyzing the visual and inscriptional content of temple and palace murals donated by merchants, monastics, and political elites. The dissertation consists of two parts: documentation and formal analysis, and semantic and historical analysis. Documentation and formal analysis of these murals, which decorate the walls and ceilings of temples and palaces, are foundational for further art historical study. I establish a rubric for style and date based on figural typology, narrative structure, and the way in which text is incorporated into the murals. I clarify the kinds of narrative structures employed by the artists, and trace how these change over time. Finally, I identify the three most prevalent genres of painting: narrative, figural (as portraits and icons), and topographic. One of the outstanding features of these murals, which no previous scholarship has seriously considered, is that script is a major compositional and semantic element of the murals. By the eighteenth century, narrative inscriptions in the Tamil and Telugu languages, whose scripts are visually distinct, consistently framed narrative paintings. For all of the major sites considered in this dissertation, I have transcribed and translated these inscriptions. Establishing a rubric for analysis of the pictorial imagery alongside translations of the text integrated into the murals facilitates my analysis of the function and iconicity of script, and application of the content of the inscriptions to interpretation of the paintings. My approach to text, which considers inscriptions to be both semantically and visually meaningful, is woven into a framework of analysis that includes ritual context, patronage, and viewing practices. In this way, the dissertation builds an historical account of an understudied period, brings to light a new archive for the study of art in South Asia, and develops a new methodology for understanding Nayaka-period painting. Chapters Three, Four, and Five each elaborate on one of the major genres identified in Chapter Two: narrative, figural, and topographic painting. My study of narrative focuses on the most popular genre of text produced at this time, talapuranam (Skt. sthalapurana), as well as hagiographies of teachers and saints (guruparampara). Turning to figural depiction, I take up the subject of portraiture. My study provides new evidence of the active patronage by merchants, religious and political elites through documentation and analysis of previously unrecorded donor inscriptions and donor portraits. Under the rubric of topographic painting I analyze the representation of sacred sites joined together to create entire sacred landscapes mapped onto the walls and ceilings of the temples. Such images are closely connected to devotional (bhakti) literature that describes and praises these places and spaces. The final chapter of the dissertation proposes new ways of understanding how the images were perceived and activated by their contemporary audiences. I argue that the kinesthetic experience of the paintings is central to their concept, design, and function.
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Melchin, Nicholas. "“How frigid zones reward the advent’rers toils”: natural history writing and the British imagination in the making of Hudson Bay, 1741-1752." Thesis, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/1828/2023.
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During the 1740’s, Hudson Bay went from an obscure backwater of the British Empire to a locus of colonial ambition. Arthur Dobbs revitalized Northwest Passage exploration, generating new information about the region’s environment and indigenous peoples. This study explores evolving English and British representations of Hudson Bay’s climate and landscape in travel and natural history writing, and probes British anxieties about foreign environments. I demonstrate how Dobbs’ ideology of improvement optimistically re-imagined the North, opening a new discursive space wherein the Subarctic could be favourably described and colonized. I examine how Hudson Bay explorers’ responses to difficulties in the Arctic and Subarctic were seen to embody, even amplify, central principles and features of eighteenth-century British culture and identity. Finally, I investigate how latitude served as a benchmark for civilization and savagery, subjugating the Lowland Cree and Inuit to British visions of settlement and improvement in their home territories.