Author: Mekhola Gomes Publisher: ISBN: 9789390430673 Category : India Languages : en Pages : 200
Book Description
Social Worlds of Premodern Transactions bring together a range of new perspectives on social and economic history. They show how exchange is not only about commodities or items, but also about interactions and relationships between people. The essays span a broad time frame, starting from the early historic and extending into the medieval. They range from studies of sites and micro-regions to translocal communities and transcontinental voyages.
Author: Prathama Banerjee Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1350355038 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 299
Book Description
The essays in this volume explore the myriad ways in which caste (varna and jati) has been theorized and critiqued in multiple philosophical, religious, logical and narrative traditions in India. Spanning ancient, medieval and modern times, and in diverse classical and vernacular languages, the chapters show how the social fact of caste, and imaginations of kinship, community and humanity were historically subject to epistemological, spiritual, and existential debate in both elite and popular circles in India. Textual Lives of Caste Across the Ages seeks to bridge the interdisciplinary gap between historians and sociologists by focusing on texts that help us think across the sociological and philosophical, the political and the religious, the epistemological and the aesthetic, and indeed, the elite and the popular. The volume also sets up a conversation between scholars specializing in different regions, archives, and historical periods and demonstrates how caste imaginaries have been deeply diverse and contested in India's past. Reconstructing these diverse traditions of social and existential criticism helps us in our contemporary struggles against caste hierarchy and untouchability and enriches our contemporary critical repertoire.
Author: Upinder Singh Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited ISBN: 9357082425 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 709
Book Description
How can the complexities of ancient India be comprehended? This book draws on a vast array of texts, inscriptions, archaeology, archival sources and art to delve into themes such as the history of regions and religions, archaeologists and the modern histories of ancient sites, the interface between political ideas and practice, violence and resistance, and the interactions between the Indian subcontinent and the wider world. It highlights recent approaches and challenges in reconstructing South Asia's early history, and in doing so, brings out the exciting complexities of ancient India. Authoritative and incisive, this revised Penguin edition-with two new chapters-is essential reading for students and scholars of ancient Indian history and for all those interested in India's past.
Author: Mahmood Kooria Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1009098039 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 467
Book Description
Circulation networks -- Circulatory texts -- Architecture of encounters -- The Code -- The commentary -- The autocommentary -- The supercommentar -- The translations.
Author: Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 9356401888 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 461
Book Description
The economic history of early India is a rich and diverse area of study, covering agricultural developments, trade, markets, occupation and professional groups, urbanization and the institutions that govern the economy. Recent research has expanded our understanding of the processes of transformation of the economy in different temporal contexts within the Indian sub-continent. They have particularly led us to explore connected histories given the trans-continental trading networks and movements of people from very early times. This volume seeks to draw attention to this vast and unexplored terrain in the economic history of early India, by bringing together essays on a new and rich historiography. Essays in the volume cover neglected regions, economic processes and structures. Scholars have looked at questions of settlements, crops that were cultivated and market orientation. Essays cover material culture and provide insights into how early Indians lived, what kinds of activities they were engaged in, and how they organised their production activities within and outside domestic spaces. Further the volume bring new insights on hierarchy of settlement types, nature of exchange, and the significance of a nodal site in exchange networks. Maritime history as well as the understanding of trade in its varied forms and manifestations are covered in several essays.
Author: Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia Publisher: Oxbow Books ISBN: 1789256143 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 448
Book Description
Markets emerge in recent historical research as important spheres of economic interaction in ancient societies. In the case of ancient Egypt, traditional models imagined an all-encompassing centralized, bureaucratic economy that left practically no place for market transactions, as many surviving documents only described the activities of the royal palace and of huge institutions?mainly temples. Yet scattered references in the sources reveal that markets and traders were crucial actors in the economic life of ancient Egypt. In this perspective, this volume aims to discuss the role of markets, traders and economic interaction (not necessarily organized through markets) and the use of “money” (metals, valuable commodities) in pre-modern societies, based on archaeological, anthropological and historical evidence. Furthermore, it intends to integrate different perspectives about the social organization of transactions and exchanges and the different forms taken by markets, from meeting places where exchanges operated under ritualized procedures and conventions, to markets in which profit-seeking activities were marginal in respect with other practices that stressed, on the contrary, community collaboration. The book also deals with social forms of pre-modern exchanges in which trust and ethnic solidarity guaranteed the validity of commercial operations in the absence of formal codes of laws or accepted authorities over long distances (trade diasporas, guilds, etc.). Finally, the volume analyzes a critical aspect of small-scale trade and markets, such as the commercialization of agricultural household production and its impact on the peasant economic strategies. In all, the book covers a diversity of topics in which recent research in the fields of economic sociology, archaeology, anthropology, economics and history proves invaluable in order to analyze the role of Egyptian trade in a broader perspective, as well as to suggest new venues of comparative research, theoretical reflection and dialogue between Egyptology and social sciences. The book will also address pre-modern social organizations of trade activities in which trust and ethnic solidarity guaranteed the validity of commercial operations in the absence of formal codes of laws or accepted authorities over long distances, particularly trade diasporas, guilds, etc. This book will be the first in the new series from Oxbow, Multidisciplinary Approaches to Ancient Societies.
Author: Chia Yin Hsu Publisher: Lexington Books ISBN: 1498505937 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 199
Book Description
In the wake of the financial crisis in 2008, historians have turned with renewed urgency to understanding the economic dimension of historical change. In this collection, nine scholars present original research into the historical development of money and credit during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and explore the social and cultural significance of financial phenomena from a global perspective. Together with an introduction by the editors, chapters emphasize themes of creditworthiness and access to credit, the role of the state in the loan market, modernization, colonialism, and global connections between markets. The first section of the volume, "Creditworthiness and Credit Risks," examines microfinancial markets in South India and Sri Lanka, Brazil, and the United States, in which access to credit depended largely on reputation, while larger investors showed a strong interest in policing economic behavior and encouraging thrift among market participants. The second section, "The Loan Market and the State," concerns attempts by national governments to regulate the lending activities of merchants and banks for social ends, from the liberal regime of nineteenth-century Switzerland to the far more statist policies of post-revolutionary Mexico, and U.S. legislation that strove to eliminate discrimination in lending. The third section, "Money, Commercial Exchange, and Global Connections," focuses on colonial and semicolonial societies in the Philippines, China, and Zimbabwe, where currency reform and the development of organized financial markets engendered conflict over competing models of economic development, often pitting the colony against the metropole. This volume offers a cultural history by considering money and credit as social relations, and explores how such relations were constructed and articulated by contemporaries. Chapters employ a variety of methodologies, including analyses of popular literature and the viewpoints of experts and professionals, investigations of policy measures and emerging social practices, and interpretations of quantitative data.
Author: Richard Jenkins Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 113480993X Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 220
Book Description
Without social identity there is no society, because without such frameworks of similarity and difference people would be unable to relate to each other in a consistent and meaningful fashion. Richard Jenkins provides a clearly-written accessible introduction to this key concept for the study of society. Arguing that social identity must be seen as both individual and collective, Jenkins shows how the work of major theorists from Mead to Bourdieu can illuminate the experience of identity in everyday life. Major concepts covered include: * embodiment * social groups and social categories * difference and community * categorisation and resistance
Author: Serena Autiero Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1000432858 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 340
Book Description
This book explores how globalization and transculturality are useful theoretical tools for studying pre-modern societies and their long-distance connections. Among the themes explored are how these concepts can enhance our understanding of trade networks, the spread of religions, the diffusion of global fashions, the migration of technologies, public and private initiatives, and wider cultural changes. In this book, archaeologists and ancient historians demonstrate how in diverse contexts – from the Bronze Age to colonial times – humanity displayed an urge and an incredible capacity to connect with distant lands and people. Adopting and modifying approaches originally developed for the study of contemporary societies, it is possible to enhance our understanding of the human past, not only in economic terms, but also the cultural significance of such interconnections. This book provides both the wider public and the specialist reader with a fresh point of view on global issues relating to the past; in turn, allowing us to look anew at developments in the contemporary world. Its large chronological and geographical scope should prove appealing to those who want more than mere Eurocentric history. Teachers and students of world history and archaeology will find this book a useful resource.
Author: Mekhola Gomes
Author: Prathama Banerjee
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Author: Upinder Singh
Author: Mahmood Kooria
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Author: Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia
Author: Chia Yin Hsu
Author: Richard Jenkins
Author: Serena Autiero