Studies in Imperialism India and Imperial Vulnerability

This is a study of disasters – cyclones, earthquakes and famines – in British India, 1770-1934, through a reading of a vast archive of colonial texts. [Final] India and imperial vulnerability explores how British writings on floods, cyclones, earthquakes and famines - spanning the seventeenth to early twentieth centuries - cast India as a natural laboratory for the study of these phenomena. In these accounts, the subcontinent emerged as a space of endemic disaster, enabling the production of imperial knowledge and and as the site of humanitarian labour by the English. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources - from eyewitness testimonies, official reports, memoirs and scientific treatises - the book investigates the writing of disaster, knowledge-practices and relief. It examines the rhetorical and epistemic frameworks through which both environmental and human suffering were rendered legible: from methods of data collection and narrative organization to the aesthetic portrayal of devastated landscapes and broken bodies.Colonial disaster writing not only reiterated familiar stereotypes, such as the irrational or superstitious native, but also generated new figures: the dignified yet deserving famine victim, and the stoic Englishman, committed to the labour of imperial humanitarianism. Disaster writing and its rhetorical modes constructed various categories of victim-subjects deserving or not of humanitarian aid. It also concomitantly constructed the figure of imperial authority, the humanitarian and the scientifically minded observer, where the Englishman was the ameliorative force in a land the writings defined as disaster-prone. ‘Imperial vulnerability’, this book argues, was central to the imagining and representation of the multiple roles of the Englishman, from observer to relief-provider. This study of famines, earthquakes and cyclones in British India, 1770-1934, moves from the aesthetics of representation through the knowledge cultures that sprang up around the disasters and finally the construction of the helpless native and the labouring Englishman. It studies the creation of imperial networks of knowledge acquisition, codification and training, as well as the employment of certain aesthetic modes when speaking of the land’s disasters. It pays attention to the categorization of the disaster victims and the work of the Englishman in understanding and helping the native. The study shows how the disasters were shaped and were shaped by imperial discourses of knowledge and learning, aesthetics of fright and horror and the labouring English.

Pages: 232, Hardcover, Manchester University Press