Author Description

The interdisciplinary collection offers a new and innovative perspective on the history of British rule in India. Focusing on people, places, and time periods at the margins of the empire, the authors take up the 'fringe' as theoretical site, geographical location, and social position to explore how those positioned at empire's boundaries had the greatest freedom for initiative and innovation. It was there that the colonial state also faced the greatest challenges to its control and authority. While exploring these themes from a variety of regional and temporal perspectives, this volume documents how fringes of the empire were powerful and productive spaces with complex and contradictory opportunities and outcomes. In contrast to the conventional chronologies, territorial expanses, and imperial personages which have dominated the story of British conquest of India, this book emphasizes the importance of different times, places and people-the European poor, Indian lunatics, pirates, soldiers, convicts, linguists, and frontiersmen-and positions these intra-colonial fringes as sites for reframing the larger imperial picture.