To avoid tax and regulatory burdens in their home countries, several shipping firms would register their companies in Panama, Liberia, Hong Kong, the Bahamas, and other Caribbean imperial outposts. These registries became offshore tax havens. With a new flag-of-convenience registered in the Bahamas in the late 1980s,
For Gulfishan Khan, one such bureaucrat, intellectual and historian was the author of Siyar-ul-Muta’khkhirin (An Overview of the Modern Times), Ghulam Husain Khan Tabatabai (born 1727). With deep connections in the old Mughal world of Delhi, Agra, Patna, and Murshidabad, Ghulam Husain wrote the book in 1783 for his British patrons in Calcutta. A fine English translation of the work was almost simultaneously prepared by a scholar, later identified as Haji Mustafa. Considered to be one of the best historical works produced in the late eighteenth century, it offers ‘a description of glorious past, as well as a sad narrative of the Mughal decline, and above all an indigenous critique of the impact of the early colonial rule’ (p. 46).
At over 600 pages, his book is comprehensive and deeply researched. It is built from extensive research into primary sources, including war diaries, personal letters and regimental records. These sources document the deployment of Indian infantrymen, artillery units, mule transport and logistic corps, and the hardships they endured on the Dardanelles Peninsula from April to December 1915
The author subjects this interpretive tradition to sustained critical scrutiny and ultimately dislodges it with compelling force. Drawing upon expansive and carefully curated archival corpus, he demonstrates that French imperial expansion was neither anomalous nor benign, but instead grounded in modalities of power and domination structurally analogous to those deployed by other European empires.
Today, nine years later, seeing the terrifying effects of Zionist zealotry unfold all across West Asia in real time, Jews with a conscience, whether in the US, Israel or Europe are asking themselves what constitutes morally defensible Jewish politics. What should their stance be, so as to not relentlessly weaponize either the long historical memory of anti-semitism or the relatively recent experience of the Holocaust? How should they stop their co-religionists from seeking to oppress and dominate supposed enemies, especially Muslims, whether in Palestine, Lebanon,
The areas explored in Sheher Mein Gaon sit atop deep and complicated sediments: the residues of older Delhis, the scars of 1857 and Partition, the afterlives of endowment, and the shifting meanings of heritage. Hauz Khas, in particular, poses a question the book might have confronted: why do the architectural remains of great learning complexes in much of the Muslim world continue to function as transregional centres of scholarship, while in India similar sites survive largely as aesthetic fragments, embedded in precarity and neglect? Delhi is full of structures that once organized knowledge, devotion, and public life.