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This volume offers a new and innovative perspective on the history of British rule in India. In contrast to the conventional chronologies, territorial expanses, and imperial personages that have dominated the story of Britain’s conquest, it emphasizes the importance of different times, places, and people—the European poor, Indian lunatics, pirates, soldiers, convicts, linguists, and frontiersmen.
Underlining ‘fringe’ as a theoretical site, a geographical location, and a social position, this book explores how it formed a powerful and productive space with complex and contradictory opportunities and outcomes. The essays demonstrate how those at the fringes of the empire had the greatest freedom for initiative and innovation and how these sites offered the greatest challenge to colonial state and authority.
The volume is divided into two parts. Part one explores the fluid nature of the empire’s temporal and geographical borders and boundaries. The second offers insights into unfamiliar people and places, insiders and outsiders. The introduction theorizes the ‘fringe’ and also provides a historical overview. A foreword by Nicholas B. Dirks shows how this unique work not only blurs the borders between metropolitan and colonial history, but also between many other genres of historical writing.
Contributors
# Sameetah Agha
# Clare Anderson
# Marina Carter
# Elizabeth Kolsky
# Alex McKay
# James H. Mills
# Lisa Mitchell
# Douglas M. Peers
# Mridu Rai
# Satadru Sen
# Philip J. Stern
ISBN - 9780198060314
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