How did past environments, objects, and people smell? What can aromas and stenches tell us about history and culture? Scents of China takes you on a smell-walk through modern Chinese history, tracing stories about opium, dried fish, Florida water, cesspools, class enemies, and many other sweet, stinky, and unnameable odours. We might have been told […]
Read MoreIranian literary historian Muhammad-Taqi Bahar (1885-1951) together with Pakistani political and literary figures
Read MoreIn 1872, the night before a meeting about the progress of education among Indian Muslims, Nawab Mohsin ul-Mulk (1837-1907) woke up and realised that his companion, the famous Muslim reformer Syed Ahmed Khan (1817-1898), was not beside him: When I went out of the room in his search, I saw him pacing up and down […]
Read MoreEarlier this year, my first book, Sex and the Making of the British Empire, originally published in 2006 gained some attention because of Bridgerton’s second season on Netflix. My book was about women who lived in India who married, cohabited with, or were enslaved by British and European officials, East India Company soldiers, and non-official […]
Read MoreSex, gender, and sexuality. What sense have different people, institutions, and the state made of these terms since the late nineteenth century? To the medical doctors, scientists, social reformers, and government officials of the emerging modern nation and empire of Japan (1868–1945), the distinction of sex from gender was largely meaningless. Sexuality was the natural […]
Read MoreHow to view the history of India in a global perspective ? One answer is to frame it within a project of ‘provincialisation’ of Europe as advocated by Dipesh Chakrabarty. But there is an alternative possibility with Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s call for ‘connected histories’. I have explored it in ‘India and the World : A History […]
Read MoreHow to tell the story of the Chinese Communist Party? It’s the biggest, oldest, and most powerful Communist Party in the world today and it turns 100 this year. It runs China, and that alone should get your interest. You’ll be hearing a good deal about it, as well. The Chinese Communist Party and its […]
Read MoreSince mid-2017, reports of massive “re-education camps” in Xinjiang province have set off global outcries over the mistreatment of Muslim Uighurs in western China. Promoted as schools for deradicalization by local authorities, their sheer scale – with an estimated total of detainees ranging from several hundred thousand to over one million – covers a significant […]
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