ABSTRACT

This is an invaluable work looking into new areas relating to India's princely states. Based on an abundance of rarely used archival material, the book sheds new light on diversities related to the princely states such as health policies and practices, gender issues, the states’ military contribution or the mechanisms for controlling or integrating the states.

Contributions are from international, reputable scholars, and they present historiographic, analytical and methodological approaches, placing attention to concepts, theories and sources. Inter-disciplinary in nature, this book will appeal to scholars and researchers of South Asia, studies of transnational histories, cultural and racial studies, international politics and economic history and the social history of health and medicine.

chapter 2|15 pages

Colonial and postcolonial historiography and the princely states

Relations of power and rituals of legitimation

chapter 3|19 pages

‘Cruel, Oriental despots’

Representations in nineteenth-century British colonial fiction, 1858–1900

chapter 4|19 pages

Narcotrafficking, princely ingenuity and the Raj

The subjugation of the Sindia state, c.1843–44

chapter 5|17 pages

The agrarian system of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir

A study of colonial settlement policies, 1860–1905

chapter 6|14 pages

The order of legitimacy

Princely Orissa, 1850–1947

chapter 7|19 pages

Loyal feudatories or depraved despots?

The deposition of princes in the Central India Agency, c. 1880–1947

chapter 8|21 pages

‘Hostages in our camp’

Military collaboration between princely India and the British Raj, c.1880–1920

chapter 9|18 pages

Historicizing debates over women’s status in Islam

The case of Nawab Sultan Jahan Begam of Bhopal 1

chapter 10|16 pages

The Maharana and the Bhils

The ‘Eki’ movement in Mewar, 1921–22

chapter 11|21 pages

Women’s hospitals and midwives in Mysore, 1870–1920

Princely or colonial medicine

chapter 12|18 pages

Public health administration in princely Mysore

Tackling the influenza pandemic of 1918