Suchergebnisse

The nature of the beast? : an elementary logic for third-class travel -- Experiencing the third-class -- Demand and supply? : railway space and social taxonomy -- Crime and punishment : in the shadow of railway embankments -- Railway time : speed, synchronization, and "time-sense" -- Contagion and control : managing disease, epidemics, and mobility -- Designing rule : power, efficiency, and anxiety -- Marking citizen from denizen : dissent, "rogues," and rupture

Abstract
Examining a series of legal challenges by newspaper companies in the first half-century after Indian Independence (1947), this essay examines the legal boundaries and practical content of press freedom in postcolonial India. The cases, which were concerned with official regulation of page length, newsprint allocation, and customs duties, were far from obvious attempts at censorship. And yet the petitioners claimed that such regulation of form, price, and material did, in fact, violate their constitutionally guaranteed right to freedom of speech and expression. Meanwhile, the newly democratic Indian state contended that its prescriptive directives were affirmative measures intended to protect fledgling newspapers from competition with larger conglomerates—and, thus, necessary to ensure such diversity of news and opinion as fostered genuine freedom of the press. In drawing attention to more prosaic and oblique ways in which the press can be controlled, this essay highlights the complexity of defining press freedom in practice, especially in functioning democracies that not only hope to maintain that status but also retain international credibility. The legal battles point to the tension between abstract ideas of freedom and affirmative commitments to equity as it materialized in a newly independent country with tremendous diversity. Given that these cases stretch across the Emergency (1975–77)—which remains a defining event in terms of formal state censorship in postcolonial India—they also demonstrate how routine strategies of control often have a more subterranean timeline that traverses formal disruptions in state–press relations, including, in this case, the transition from colonialism to independence.

AbstractExamining cases of libel between 1780 and 1823, this article analyses how the theory and practice of press regulation and governmentality was initially articulated in colonial India, embodied in everyday transactions between the newly invented East India Company state and an emerging newspaper press. While Company officials recognized that scrutiny by a free press was central to establishing their fairly new claims to just governance and public legitimacy, they feared that public critique would destabilize the very sovereign authority that they sought to establish. Concerned with appearing arbitrary, officials developed strategies through which they could demand obedience without necessarily predicating it on censorship. Journalists derived much of their negotiating power from the early colonial state's vulnerability to public scrutiny, but they also knew that the state possessed extensive control over their livelihood. Cognizant of the power and constraints of colonial governmentality at this juncture, they produced their own mechanisms of permissible intransigence. This uneasy equilibrium generated the questions explored in this article: What rights of comment and critique practically accrued to newspapers? What was the legal authority of executive regulations censoring newspapers and how far were these enforceable? Why, in practice, did punishments remain strikingly similar across periods with and without formal censorship? The cases between 1780 and 1823 not only reveal the historical negotiations that structured this foundational—though somewhat marginalized—period of India's press history, but also explain the strategic shifts that followed as, in 1823, the fulcrum of crime and punishment turned away from press censorship and towards press licensing.

AbstractThis paper traces the establishment of standardized railway time in colonial India between 1854 and 1905, and explores how the colonized—as passengers and population—negotiated the temporal re-structuring introduced through railways. Millions were affected by the process through which the time of a single meridian was selected as an all-India railway time, and gradually deemed civil time, continuing even today as Indian Standard Time. The paper explores everyday responses to this dramatic change in 'time-sense' engendered through railways, both as speedy transport and as standardized time. This allows for a historical analysis of how individuals and societies deal in practice with abstract technological transformations, and of how colonized populations have navigated the modernizing intervention of imperialist states. It argues that the ways in which the population of colonial India accepted, contested, and appropriated the temporal standardization instituted through railways and railway time challenged imperial policies determined by reified presumptions of metropolitan versus colonial 'time-sense'. Since these responses were often analogous to how people and societies across the globe were responding to temporal standardization, they disrupt imperial strategies that used time-sense to locate colonized populations outside of History, in effect excluding them from their own present. They thus serve to materially de-stabilize a narrative of colonial time-lag and to reclaim the historical present as a time in which the colonizer and colonized exist contemporaneously. Consequently, they reconfigure modernity as an experiential rather than as a normative historical present.

Abstract
What was colonial about colonial print culture? By analyzing the social and material dimensions of print—its practices, communities, networks, and technologies—our special issue probes whether and how colonialism shaped the specific print cultures that took shape across varied and geographic and temporal contexts. In so doing, we contribute to a wide-ranging intervention on print that has, in recent decades, dismantled teleological narratives linking global modernity with the diffusion of European printing. Contributors make the case for situating histories of print and the public sphere within the world of comparative social analysis, rather than singularly within book, cultural, or intellectual history. By attending to the materiality of printing and the ground-level practices and "tactics" of production and circulation, contributors not only reveal the wide range of social actors who helped to shape the uses and meanings of print—including colonial and postcolonial officials and journalists as well as manufacturers, artisans, merchants, and collectors—but also identify overlooked connections within and between regions that linked practitioners and readers rooted in diverse colonial and postcolonial contexts. Rather than charting a linear march towards mass printing or a homogenous global printing industry, the essays highlight the temporal asymmetries of colonial printing and the political and economic forces and human actors that shaped the specific regional and local trajectories of print.

David Warren Sabean was a pioneer in the historical-anthropological study of kinship, community, and selfhood in early modern and modern Europe. His career has helped shape the discipline of history through his supervision of dozens of graduate students and his influence on countless other scholars. This book collects wide-ranging essays demonstrating the impact of Sabean's work has on scholars of diverse time periods and regions, all revolving around the prominent issues that have framed his career: kinship, community, and self. The significance of David Warren Sabean's scholarship is reflected in original research contributed by former students and essays written by his contemporaries, demonstrating Sabean's impact on the discipline of history