Bücher der Reihe Cambridge South Asian Studies

This book is based on extensive and previously unused Portuguese and Dutch archival sources. Its secondary theme is to explore the relationship between the documentation used and the context within which it was generated, thus illuminating how Europeans and Asians reacted to one another.

South India is often portrayed as a land of Hindu orthodoxy, yet in fact three great 'world religions' have inter-acted in the region over many centuries. Saints, Goddesses and Kings investigates the social and religious world of those South Indians who came to identify themselves as Christians and Muslims.

This book examines the impact of British rule on the Indian peasantry, and the changes it brought. It finds that significant long-term economic and social change did occur but that the highly 'differential' pattern to commercialisation prevented any structural transformation in the peasant economy and society.

This book explores the dual and sometimes conflicting roles of the zamindari, the landed chiefs, in eighteenth-century western Bengal during the decline of the Mughal empire and the rise of the British hegemony. It discusses zamindari rent extraction, techniques of coercion, and the meaning of gift-giving and gift-receiving.

The nineteenth century saw the beginning of a violent and controversial movement of protest amongst western India's low and untouchable castes, aimed at the effects of their lowly position within the Hindu caste hierarchy. This study concentrates on the first leader of this movement, Mahatma Jotirao Phule.

In this book, Dr Sarah Ansari examines the system of political control constructed by the British in Sind between 1843 and 1947. In particular, she looks at the part of the local Muslim religious elite, the pirs or hereditary sufi saints, whose participation in the system ensured its success.

Combining a sophisticated theoretical analysis with evidence from archival records, village documents and oral testimonies, Bonded Histories presents an original and compelling view of the changing relationship between landlords and labourers in southern Bihar. It will be of interest to historians, social anthropologists and contemporary social theorists.

The first major study of the relationship between labour and capital in India's economic development in the early twentieth-century. The author considers the spread of capitalism and the growth of the cotton textile industry.

This original study of the relationship between state and civil society in Pakistan demonstrates how the courts have influenced constitutional development and state structure.

This study thus illuminates how Asian capitals were not the great amorphous agglomerations described by Marx and Weber. Instead they were urban communities with their own distinctive style and character, dependent on a particular kind of state organization.

These twelve essays explore the nature of south Asian agrarian society and examine the extent to which it changed during the period of British rule. The central focus of the book is directed to peasant agitation and violence and four of the studies look at the agrarian explosion that formed the background to the 1857 Mutiny. The essays give a coherent historical treatment of the Indian peasant world, and the paperback edition of this successful book will be of interest to the student of peasant studies and to the sociologist as well as to development economists and agronomists generally.

This study examines the influence of commercial interests on the expansion of the British Empire in Western India in the age of Cornwallis and Wellesley. It questions some of the assumptions which have been accepted as explanations of British imperialism in that part of India.

In 1957, Kerala became the first region in Asia to elect a communist government parliamentary procedure. Dilip Menon's book traces the social history of comunism in Malabar, the bastion of the movement, and looks at how the ideology was transformed into a doctrine of caste equality, as national strategies were reshaped by local circumstance and tinged by pragmatism.

In The State of Martial Rule Ayesha Jalal analyses the dialectic between state construction and political processes in Pakistan in the first decade of the country's independence and convincingly demonstrates how the imperatives of the international system in the 'cold war' era combined with regional and domestic factors to mould the structure of the Pakistani state.

Robert Wade examines the economic conditions for collective action drawing on research in areas of Andhra Pradesh where rain is scarce and unreliable, argues that some villagers develop and finance joint institutions for cooperative management of common property resources in grazing and irrigation - but others do not. The main reason lies in the risk of crop loss.

The Swatantra Party, founded in 1959 to provide a right-wing opposition to the ruling Congress Party, has since become the leading opposition in the Indian national parliament. Dr Erdman examines the background, emergence and growth of Swatantra within the framework of conservative politics in India.

Why some Indian Muslims under British rule should have organised politics on a communal basis is one of the most important problems in the history of the subcontinent.

Dr Hardy has attempted a general history of British India's Muslims with a deeper perspective. He shows how the interplay of memories of past Muslim supremacy, Islamic religious aspirations and modern Muslim social and economic anxieties with the political needs of the alien ruling power gradually fostered a separate Muslim politics.

An analysis of gender and property throughout South Asia which argues that the most important economic factor affecting women is the gender gap in command over property.

Although one of the acknowledged achievements of the British Raj was the extensive construction of irrigation works, their effects have to date been little studied by historians. Focusing upon the western Uttar Pradesh, this book looks at the response of the peasant economy to this important and pervasive form of technological change.

Concentrating on the All-India Muslim League, this book assesses the role of religious communalism in shaping the movement for Pakistan.

Bengal Divided relates how a large and powerful section of Hindu society in Bengal insisted that their province be divided to create a separate Hindu homeland. The picture which emerges is one of a fragmented society moving away from the mainstream of Indian nationalism, and increasingly preoccupied with more parochial concerns.