Round Table Conference Geographies: Constituting Colonial India in Interwar London - Hardcover

Legg, Stephen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1009215310 ISBN 13: 9781009215312

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2023

Synopsis

Round Table Conference Geographies explores a major international conference in 1930s London which determined India's constitutional future in the British Empire. Pre-dating the decolonising conferences of the 1950s–60s, the Round Table Conference laid the blueprint for India's future federal constitution. Despite this the conference is unanimously read as a failure, for not having comprehensively reconciled the competing demands of liberal and Indian National Congress politicians, of Hindus and Muslims, and of British versus Princely India. This book argues that the conference's three sessions were vital sites of Indian and imperial politics that demand serious attention. It explores the spatial politics of the conference in terms of its imaginary geographies, infrastructures, host city, and how the conference was contested and represented. The book concludes by asking who gained through representing the conference as a failure and explores it, instead, as a teeming political, social and material space.

About this title

About the Author

Stephen Legg is Professor of Historical Geography at University of Nottingham, England. He is a specialist on interwar colonial India with a particular interest in the politics of urban space within imperial and international frames. He has analyzed these spaces and frames through drawing upon theoretical approaches from memory scholarship, postcolonialism, political theory and governmentality studies. He published the co-edited volume (with Deana Heath) South Asian Governmentalities: Michel Foucault and the Question of Postcolonial Orderings with the Press in 2018. Some of his other publications are Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi's Urban Governmentalities (2007), Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India (2014) and the edited collection Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt: Geographies of the Nomos (2011).

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1009215310
• ISBN 13: 9781009215312
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 414