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...

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.

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...

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...

Informative, timely and accessible introduction to the study of South Asia by leading scholars in the field.

First published in 1983, Rural India intends to provide pictures of Indian rural society in the past, from the standpoint of relationships and exchanges between the countryside and the more general physical and cultural context of which it is a part. A predominant theme is control over land and people. Others are the impact of British rule, the political role of local networks and ties, and the response to and internalising of external stimuli. Attempts are made to examine the con...

First published in 1983, Rural South Asia examines questions of change and development in terms of linkages between localities and the outside world. The authors examine the response specifically to the introduction of a ‘modern’ features of production, the importance of physical, cultural and economic communication, and the impact of various development efforts. This book will be of interest to student of South Asian studies, history, economics and agriculture.

First published in 1978, Rural, Protest, Identity consists of eleven essays on modern South Asia. Its concern is with the diversity of the region, to suggest how its study may be enriched by the juxtaposition of various disciplines, and in particular through the examination of familiar subjects from less familiar points of view. Four papers deal with the ruling of modern India. One examines the relationship between the British government and an Indian state, one the legal implicat...

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...

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 ...

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.