Reading the East India Company, 1720–1840 – Colonial Currencies of Gender (Women in Culture & Society Series WCS) - Hardcover

Joseph, Betty

9780226412023: Reading the East India Company, 1720–1840 – Colonial Currencies of Gender (Women in Culture & Society Series WCS)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226412024 ISBN 13: 9780226412023

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2004

Betty Joseph offers an account of how archives - and the practice of archiving - shaped colonial ideologies in Britain and British-controlled India during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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Review:

"Though addressed to literary critics and historians, the book contains valuable insight for economists on the central role of gender in Indian economic and political life. . . . A powerful statement on how to read and what to read, as we construct the political and economic history of the colonization of India."--Brian Cooper "Feminist Economics "

"[Joseph] has produced an important analysis, which historians and cultural critics of all sorts will appreciate, of the ways in which archival and other kinds of writing do some of the ideological work of imperial power and function as barometers of shifts in its political, military, and gendering practices."--Kathleen Wilson "Radical History Review "

"A book that rewards careful reading both by those interested in the history of the novel in this period, and by those who think about the interrelations between institutions of empire, systems of colonial knowledge, and forms of modern subjectivity."--Suvir Kaul "Eifghteenth-Century Life "

"Joseph's search for lost voices is impressive because it does not rely merely on archaeological investigation; rather, the official record is excavated in order to be recontexualized, so that the voluminous paper trail of the Company's administration does not itself authoritatively represent British-controlled India.... Finding ways in which to represent even the faintest presence of women in the official record, Joseph devotes the second half of her illuminating study to examples of English and Asian women whose names or utterances played a significant part in forming history.... Recovering their voices from the archive and reminding readers that the official record did not stand alone in the making of British India, Joseph's imaginative study makes a vital contribution to the historiography of colonialism."--Alison Stenton "Times Literary Supplement "

"Joseph is able to move from factory records to novels to paintings to guidebooks in her attempt to reveal the ways in which the figure of woman worked within, sometimes at the edge of or even against, imperialist imperatives. This movement . . . is one of the great strengths of the book. . . . Reading the East India Company is, in its contribution to the scholarship regarding early British India, postcolonial theory, and feminist studies, a valuable and resourceful book."--Teresa Hubel "Canadian Literature "

About the Author:

Betty Joseph is an associate professor of English at Rice University.

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