Tracking Modernity

The ubiquitous railway as a symbol of the tensions of Indian modernity.

Our main discussion in this book Indian society, polity and culture of the colonial period. Indian society in the 19th century was caught in an inhuman web created by religious superstition and social obscuration. Hinduism, has become a compound of magic, animation and superstition and monstrous rites like animal sacrifice and physical torture had replaced the worship of God. The most painful was position of women. The British conquest and dissemination colonial culture and ideology led to introspection about the strength and weakness of indigenous culture and civilization. The social reform movements which emerged in India in the 19th century arose to the challenges that colonial Indian society faced. The well-known issues are that of sati, child marriage, ban on widow remarriage and caste discrimination. It is not that attempts were not made to fight social discrimination in pre-colonial India. They were central to Buddhism, to Bhakti and Sufi movements. What marked these 19th century social reform attempts were the modern context and mix of ideas. It was a creative combination of modern ideas of western liberalism and a new look on traditional literature.We hope that students will benefited a lot from reading this book.

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. From fashion sketches of smartly dressed Shanghai dandies in the 1920s, to multipanel drawings of refugee urbanites during the war against Japan, to panoramic pictures of anti-American propaganda rallies in the early 1950s, the polymorphic cartoon-style art known as manhua helped define China's modern experience. Manhua Modernity offers a richly illustrated, deeply contextualized analysis of these illustrations across the lively pages of popular pictorial magazines that entertained, informed, and mobilized a nation through a half century of political and cultural transformation. In this compelling media history, John Crespi argues that manhua must be understood in the context of the pictorial magazines that hosted them, and in turn these magazines must be seen as important mediators of the modern urban experience. Even as times changed—from interwar-era consumerism to war-time mobilization to Mao-style propaganda—the art form adapted to stay on the cutting edge of both politics and style.

A World History of Railway Cultures, 1830-1930 is the first collection of primary sources to historicize the cultural impact of railways on a global scale from their inception in Great Britain to the Great Depression. Its dual purpose is to promote understanding of complex historical processes leading to globalization and generate interest in transnational and global comparative research on railways. In four volumes, organized by historical geography, this scholarly collection gathers rare out-of-print published and unpublished materials from archival and digital repositories throughout the world. It adopts a capsule approach that focuses on short selections of significant primary source content instead of redundant and irrelevant materials found in online data collections. The current collection draws attention to railway cultures through railroad reports, parliamentary papers, government documents, police reports, public health records, engineering reports, technical papers, medical surveys, memoirs, diaries, travel narratives, ethnographies, newspaper articles, editorials, pamphlets, broadsides, paintings, cartoons, engravings, photographs, art, ephemera, and passages from novels and poetry collections that shed light on the cultural history of railways. The editor’s original essays and headnotes on the cultural politics of railways introduce over 200 carefully selected primary sources. Students and researchers come to understand railways not as applied technological impositions of industrial capitalism but powerful, fluid, and idiosyncratic historical constructs.

As early as the 1910s, African drivers in colonial Ghana understood the possibilities that using imported motor transport could further the social and economic agendas of a diverse array of local agents, including chiefs, farmers, traders, fishermen, and urban workers. Jennifer Hart's powerful narrative of auto-mobility shows how drivers built on old trade routes to increase the speed and scale of motorized travel. Hart reveals that new forms of labor migration, economic enterprise, cultural production, and social practice were defined by autonomy and mobility and thus shaped the practices and values that formed the foundations of Ghanaian society today. Focusing on the everyday lives of individuals who participated in this century of social, cultural, and technological change, Hart comes to a more sensitive understanding of the ways in which these individuals made new technology meaningful to their local communities and associated it with their future aspirations.

This book shows how railway technology, travel, and infrastructure became increasingly and inextricably woven into everyday life in colonial South Asia.

Shows how text mining - the art of counting words over time - spurs insights into politics, culture, and historical change.

Compares twentieth-century literature from a network of British colonial cities, tracing a new, peripheral history of urban modernism.