Research

Papers

An able and skilful artist: The career of Paul Benfield
of the English East India Company
September 2000

Today he is remembered primarily as the chief creditor of Nawab Muhammad Ali Khan of Arcot—remembered, primarily, because of the vitriol flung at him by Edmund Burke in his speech on the Nawab’s debts, in which, borrowing from Shakespeare, Burke denounced Benfield as ‘a criminal who long since ought to have fattened the region kites with his offal.’

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“I know nothing about them, nor I don’t wish to”:
The memsahib and the myth of the lost empire
March 2000

The Anglo-Indian community was insular, conformist, a nest of prejudices, habits, and rules. With all the stresses of moving to a new community halfway around the world it must have come as something of a relief to the newly arrived British wife that she was not expected to know, or learn, much of India or Indians; rather the reverse.

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Mothers, memsahibs, goddesses and whores:
Debates over women’s education in 19th-century India
February 2000

Jealousy, it was believed, was in the nature of women, and if not controlled by grihakarya, ‘the auspicious rituals of domestic work,’ would weaken or even destroy the family. Advocates of women’s education argued that the right sort of improving education—in dharma, ritual, and morally instructive literature—would remove jealousy and restore to women their Lakshmi-nature.

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The decision for war and the limits of rationality
December 1999

[P]erfect rationality is, as Mark Twain said of perfect grammar, ‘the fourth dimension, so to speak; many have sought it, but none has found it.’ Between the Platonic ideal of rational economic man and the voluntarily bestial Norse berserker are a wide range of motivations and strategies.

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Dependencia and modernization
January 1999

The polarization of the debate seems to have been inevitable. It is always helpful when one’s foes make caricatures of themselves, saving one the trouble of doing so oneself.

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