Colonialism & Its Forms of Knowledge – the British in India (Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History) - Hardcover

Cohn, Bernard S

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691032939 ISBN 13: 9780691032931

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 1996

Synopsis

This collection of his writings in the last fifteen years discusses areas in which the colonial impact has generally been overlooked. The essays form an exploration of the ways in which the British discovery, collection, and codification of information about Indian project of control and command. He also asserts that an arena of colonial power that seemed most benign and most susceptible to indigenous influences - mostly law - in fact became responsible for the institutional reactivation of peculiarly British notions about how to regulate a colonial society made up of "others". he shows how the very orientalist imagination that led to brilliant antiquarian collections, archaeological finds, and photographic forays were in fact forms of constructing an India that could be better packaged, inferiorized, and ruled. A final essay on cloth suggests how clothes have been part of the history of both colonialism and anticolonialism.

About this title

About the Author

Bernard S. Cohn is Professor Emeritus of History and Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays and India: The Social Anthropology of a Civilization.

Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0691032939
• ISBN 13: 9780691032931
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 210