Worldly afterlives : tracing family trails between india and empire /
Julia Stephens
Bok · Engelsk · 2025
| Omfang | pages cm
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| Opplysninger | "Indian migrants provided the labor that enabled Britain to amass control over a quarter of the world's population and territory-as soldiers, sailors, peddlers, commodity pickers, and even circus performers. In the late 1800s, the British began building an elaborate global bureaucracy to govern their mobile subjects, including ID photographs, passports, customs forms, and wills. They also collected voluminous archives of workers' bodies and belongings-for example, handwritten IOUs, tattered photographs, and descriptions of leather handbags and copper bangles. Worldly Afterlives uses this trove of materials to uncover and tell the stories of these largely silent subjects of the British empire. A social history of Indian migration and a political history of British imperial governance, this book offers a new methodological approach to how the subjects that we think of as lost may be remembered. Navigating the remains of British imperial bureaucracy-scattered in archives across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East-historian Julia Stephens also draws on the memories of family members and local lore, grounding her history in specific lives. She reconstructs the stories of Indian migrants to understand the relationship between mass migration, shifts in global capitalism, and changes in imperial governance. Working at the intersection of history and genealogy, Stephens also reconsiders professional assumptions about what constitutes a reliable source, addressing new genealogical resources like Ancestry.com and 23andMe, and who may be considered a "historian.""--
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| ISBN | 9780691205458
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| ISBN(galt) |