Empires and their aftermaths were massive planning institutions; in the past two hundred years, the natural and social sciences emerged—at least in part—as modes of knowledge production for imperial planning. Yet these connections are frequently under-emphasized in the history of science and its corollary fields.The Planning Moment explores the myriad ways plans and planning practices pervade recent global history. The book is built around twenty-seven brief case studies t...

Why do countries go to war over disputed lands? Why do they fight even when the territories in question are economically and strategically worthless? Drawing on critical approaches to international relations, political geography, international law, and social history, and based on a close examination of the Indian experience during the twentieth century, Itty Abraham addresses these important questions and offers a new conceptualization of foreign policy as a state territorializing practic...

On the premise that words have the power to make worlds, each essay in this book follows a word as it travels around the globe and across time. Scholars from five disciplines address thirteen societies to highlight the social and political life of words in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The approach is consciously experimental, in that rigorously tracking specific words in specific settings frequently leads in unexpected directions and al...

In the third edition of his classic work, revised extensively and updated to include recent developments on the international scene, Jack Donnelly explains and defends a richly interdisciplinary account of human rights as universal rights. He shows that any conception of human rights—and the idea of human rights itself—is historically specific and contingent.Since publication of the first edition in 1989, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice has j...

This book moves the discussion of affirmative action beyond the United States to other countries that have had similar policies, often for a longer time than Americans have. It also moves the discussion beyond the theories, principles, and laws that have been so often debated to the actual empirical consequences of affirmative action in the United States and in India, Nigeria, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and other countries. Both common patterns and national differences are examined. Much of what...

India today looms large globally, where it hardly loomed at all twenty years ago. It is likely to be a key global actor throughout the twenty-first century and could well emerge soon as one of the top five global powers. Does the Elephant Dance? seeks to survey the main features of Indian foreign policy. It identifies elements of Indian history relevant to the topic; examines the role therein of domestic politics and internal and external security challenges, and of domestic and internatio...

This theoretically innovative anthology investigates the problematic linkages between conserving cultural heritage, maintaining cultural diversity, defining and establishing cultural citizenship, and enforcing human rights.It is the first publication to address the notions of cultural diversity, cultural heritage and human rights in one volume. Heritage provides the basis of humanity’s rich cultural diversity. While there is a considerable literature dealing separately with cultura...

South Asian History has enjoyed a remarkable renaissance over the past thirty years. Its historians are not only producing new ways of thinking about the imperial impact and legacy on South Asia, but also helping to reshape the study of imperial history in general. The essays in this collection address a number of these important developments, delineating not only the complicated interplay between imperial rulers and their subjects in India, but also illuminating the economic, political, e...

Breaking new ground in scholarship, Niraja Jayal writes the first history of citizenship in the largest democracy in the world—India. Unlike the mature democracies of the west, India began as a true republic of equals with a complex architecture of citizenship rights that was sensitive to the many hierarchies of Indian society. In this provocative biography of the defining aspiration of modern India, Jayal shows how the progressive civic ideals embodied in the constitution have been challe...

Sudipta Kaviraj has long been recognized as among Indias most thoughtful and wide-ranging political thinkers and analysts, one of the subtlest and most learned writers on Indian politics. Ironically, this has remained something of a state secret because Kavirajs writings are scattered and not easy to access as a connected body. So the present volumelike its predecessor The Imaginary Institution of Indiafills a vital gap in South Asian political thought.Among Kavirajs many strengths is his exc...

Often dismissed as the rumblings of "the street," popular politics is where political modernity is being formed today, according to Partha Chatterjee. The rise of mass politics all over the world in the twentieth century led to the development of new techniques of governing population groups. On the one hand, the idea of popular sovereignty has gained wide acceptance. On the other hand, the proliferation of security and welfare technologies has created modern governmental bodies that admin...

This book focuses on transformations of political culture from times past to future-present. It defines the meaning of political culture and explores the cultural values and institutions of kinship communities and dynastic intermediaries, including chiefdoms and early states. It systematically examines the rise and gradual universalization of modern sovereign nation-states. Contemporary debates concerning nationality, nationalism, citizenship, and hyphenated identities are engaged. The aut...