Partho Datta’s book turns out to be a particularly instructive read in a city struck by an epidemic of dengue and viral fevers in an August of disappeared monsoons, the spread of the vector and virus linked in no small degree to civic mismanagement and lapses in public health administration…
The Rebellion of 1857 has elicited a relentless flow of academic and popular responses, scholarly as well as polemical works, though unarguably, the fiftieth (1907), hundredth (1957) and hundred and fiftieth anniversaries (2007) have generated exemplary interventions on the nature, internal contradictions as well as inhering diversities of 1857.
At a time when it has become fashionable in some academic circles to champion the cause of empire as a guarantee of global stability, at a time when Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s influential Empire seeks to make colonialism respectable by advocating the notion of a ‘centreless Empire’, at a time when we are being told by apologists such as Niall Ferguson that imperialism has been a benign historical force, Partha Chatterjee’s important book, Black Hole of Empire, reminds us that empire is ultimately about lies, deceit and violence…
Professor Misra’s book, Quest for an International Order in the Indian Ocean is a well structured analysis of the politico-strategic significance of the Indian Ocean, the interests of the big powers and the response of the littorals…
Without seaborne activities, human existence is inconceivable. Oceans, seas, waterways, shipbuilding, banking, exploration, navigation and various other activities and sciences are just a few areas that we come to learn of through maritime history.
When a delicately carved Indian miniature ivory statuette depicting a young woman was discovered in 1938 along with other finely crafted goods in the ruins of, probably in a merchant’s house in Pompeii, Italy datable to the first century of the common era, there was not only…