This book explores the intersection of public and private temporal systems. Examining Calcutta between 1780 and 1830, it reveals how time functioned as both a regulatory mechanism of emerging colonial governance and a deeply personal construct that continued to reflect pre-colonial norms and practices.The author navigates the complex temporal landscape of early colonial Calcutta, where European clock-based standardisation encountered and co-existed with indigenous temporal framewor...

Delving into Brazil's baroque past, Peter Robb writes about its history of slavery and the richly multicultural but disturbed society that was left in its wake when the practice was abolished in the late nineteenth century.Even today, Brazil is a nation of almost unimaginable distance between its wealthy and its poor, a place of extraordinary levels of crime and violence. It is also one of the most beautiful and seductive places on earth. Using the art, food and the books of its gr...

Richard Blechynden was a surveyor, architect, and builder in early colonial Bengal. This volume and its companion (Sentiment and Self) use 80 volumes of his diaries and other archival material along with anecdotes, extracts, and stories to recreate histories of everyday life.   While Sentiment and Self explores issues like interactions between Europeans and Indians, race and tolerance, this volume focuses on the position of women, especially concubines, or bibis and their sexual and emotio...

Naples is always a shock, flaunting beauty and squalor like nowhere else. Naples is the only city in Europe whose ancient past still lives in its irrepressible people. Their ancestors came from all over the early Mediterranean to the wide bay and its islands, shadowed by a dormant volcano. Not all of them found what they were looking for, but they made a great and terribly human city.Peter Robb's Street Fight in Naples ranges across nearly three thousand years of Neapolita...

The first systematic attempt to introduce a full range of Japanese scholarship on the agrarian history of British India to the English-language reader. Suggests the fundamental importance of an Asian comparative perspective for the understanding of Indian history.

This book analyses the character of British rule in nineteenth-century India, by focusing on the underlying ideas and the practical repercussions of agrarian policy. It argues that the great rent law debate and the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885 helped constitute a revolution in the effective aims of government and in the colonial ability to interfere in India, but that they did so alongside a continuing weakness of understanding and in effective local control. In particular, the book consider...

Peter Robb's journey into the dark heart of Sicily uses history, painting, literature and food to shed light on southern Italy's legacy of political corruption and violent crime. Taking the trial of seven-times Prime Minister, Giulio Andreotti, for alleged Mafia involvement as its starting point, Midnight in Sicily combines a searching investigation with an exuberant, sensual appreciation of this beautiful and bewildering island.

"A world on the precipice of the apocalypse. A secret forged in the flames of war. A chance to start over.For John Sutton, only one of those three things matters.Retired from a decade of brutal war, he wants nothing more than a quiet pastoral life while he does his best to stem the steady increase of his Doom Points before they hit 100, signaling the start of the end.He’s been given a small farm on the outskirts of the empire as a thanks for his service, but no matt...

This book looks at agriculture, development, poverty and British rule in India, especially in the Patna Division in Bihar between c.1870–1920. It traces the economic influence of British policies and maps the impact of legal, administrative and scientific interventions to rural conditions and norms in the state.The book discusses British theories and policies of ‘improvement’, comparing them with Bihar’s agricultural practice and socio-economic conditions to draw conclusions about ...

Richard Blechynden was a surveyor, architect, and builder in early colonial Bengal. This volume and its companion (Sex and Sensibility) use 80 volumes of his diaries and other archival material along with anecdotes, extracts, and stories to recreate histories of everyday life.   While Sex and Sensibility deals with larger issues of sexuality, concubines, and dynamics of households in colonial Bengal, this volume deals with life in Calcutta and the re-creation of a British identity. It expl...

Dina Demille may run the nicest Bed and Breakfast in Red Deer, Texas, but she caters to a very particular kind of guest… the kind that no one on Earth is supposed to know about. Guests like a former intergalactic tyrant with an impressive bounty on her head, the Lord Marshal of a powerful vampire clan, and a displaced-and-superhot werewolf; so don’t stand too close, or you may be collateral damage. But what passes for Dina’s normal life is about to be thrown into chaos. First, she must res...

With the mystery of the world deepening, John Sutton is running out of time.The apocalypse is approaching as his Doom Points tick up and John is finding it harder and harder to keep it together. His deepening knowledge of magic seems to be helping but as a hidden society creeps out of the shadows, intent on throwing the world into chaos, it may not be enough.The only good news seems to be the new crops springing up on his farm. Balancing his growing relationship with Ellie ...