Reprint of the original, first published in 1894.

The subject of maritime and oceanic history comprises a large corpus and includes related thematic engagements such as the history of overseas exploration and expansion, navalmilitary history, shipping, port cities, the role of migrations and cross-cultural processes. This extensive field of enquiry also focuses upon the study of littoral societies or the coastal regions, in understanding the influence of the ocean upon these lands. The interface between the land and the sea, with its several ecological and topographical variations, has played an important role in determining human activity, the settlement patterns and material culture in the coastal regions, which taken together constitute huge masses of territories in all continents. The general pattern of existence and the rhythm of life in all these dissociated regions, however, had considerable commonality, due to the overwhelming impact of the two dominant elements-water and land-in shaping the destinies of its inhabitants. Coastal societies have their own particular notion of identity and ambience, which differentiates them from the extensive continental zones. It is in this context, that coastal territories and their histories constitute an interesting theme of enquiry. The present volume examines a number of themes pertaining to different coastal regions of India: coastal ecology, commercial crops, transmission of diseases, fortifications, port hierarchy, new port towns, vessels and boats, fishing communities, social life of women, etc. It should be of interest to students and scholars of maritime history of India.

Guiding the reader on a tour of the sights and sounds of an emerging city struggling to shake off colonialism and wrestling with the formation of its own budding identity, Narayan’s beguiling book offers descriptions of Mumbai’s daily life, its people and its institutions: the parts of the whole that come together to create this diverse and vivacious place. This valuable text is a rare and enthralling glimpse into a fascinating period and place otherwise lost to time.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Bombay was beset by crises such as famine and plague. Yet, rather than halting the flow of capital, these crises served to secure it. In colonial Bombay, capitalists and governors, Indian and British alike, used moments of crisis to justify interventions that delimited the city as a distinct object and progressively excluded laborers and migrants from it. Town planners, financiers, and property developers joined forces to secure the city as a space for commerce and encoded shelter types as legitimate or illegitimate. By the early twentieth century, the slum emerged as a particularly useful category of stigmatization that would animate city-making projects in subsequent decades. Sheetal Chhabria locates the origins of Bombay’s now infamous “slum problem” in the broader histories of colonialism and capitalism. She not only challenges assumptions about colonial urbanization and cities in the global south, but also provides a new analytical approach to urban history. Making the Modern Slum shows how the wellbeing of the city–rather than of its people–became an increasingly urgent goal of government, positioning agrarian distress, famished migrants, and the laboring poor as threats to be contained or excluded.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1965.

From the acclaimed historian of global empire, the dramatic story of how steam power reshaped our cities and our seas, and forged a new world order Steam power transformed our world, initiating the complex, resource-devouring industrial system the consequences of which we live with today. It revolutionized work and production, but also the ease and cost of movement over land and water. The result was to throw open vast areas of the world to the rampaging expansion of Europeans and Americans on a scale previously unimaginable. Unlocking the World is the captivating history of the great port cities which emerged as the bridgeheads of this new steam-driven economy, reshaping not just the trade and industry of the regions around them but their culture and politics as well. They were the agents of what we now call 'globalization', but their impact and influence, and the reactions they provoked, were far from predictable. Nor were they immune to the great upheavals in world politics across the 'steam century'. This book is global history at its very best. Packed with fascinating case histories (from New Orleans to Montreal, Bombay to Singapore, Calcutta to Shanghai), individual stories and original ideas, Darwin's book allows us, for better or worse, to see the modern age taking shape.