I introduce the geographical and chronological frames of the book in terms of the current historiography of the transition from Mughal to British rule and of music history. I lay out the book’s conceptual framework: 1) the use of musicians’ stories to illuminate the changes wrought in the transition; 2) the examination of several types of Indian and European writing on music prominent at this time, most of which have been overlooked, that reveal these changes; and 3) my deeper interest in why writers tried to capture music in words when they knew it was impossible. I contextualise the sources on which my history is based within a consideration of the concept of paracolonial knowledge systems and social networks. And I introduce my overarching philosophical question: whether it is ever possible for Orpheus (writing on music) to bring Eurydice (music and its experience) back from the dead.

England was probably the first country in Europe to construct a sense of itself as a nation state, but even as it did so the boundaries of native tradition remained uncertain. In the sixteenth century two competing narratives of nationhood are visible, one British and the other Anglo-Saxon (Warner, Spenser, Drayton), and it is the second, more specifically English narrative that comes to supersede the British story (Shakespeare’s histories). Those narratives are complemented in the field of verse form by a further competition between art, represented by classical metres, and nature, represented by native English ‘rhyme’, in which the latter asserts its claims to literary status and value, and history and prosody then converge in the idea of the long line. The achievement of a sense of English national identity in literature is finally constructed as a triumph of nature over art (Daniel).

Devoted to issues of change and continuity, Chapter 6 considers the social reproduction of families, particularly the ways in which ‘change’ and ‘continuity’ (understood as tradition) are drawn upon as tropes in moral economies of transnational kinship. In examining each generation of migrants in turn, I suggest that younger migrants assert ‘continuity through change’, a moral claim with important historical resonances, while older women generate ‘change through continuity’ in familial practices. ‘Change’ emerges as a form of social betrayal, complicating ideas of change as understood in narratives of modernity and in Christianity, particularly its presumed desirability. What is at stake in ‘having changed’, an accusation non-migrants level at migrant kin, are existential questions of personhood and belonging, along with potential access to symbolic and material resources.

The British colonisation of Van Diemen’s Land (later Tasmania) began in 1803. There was an estimated 6,000 Aborigines (Palawa) living on the island with a history dating back over 40,000 years. By 1835, there were just over 100 Palawa living in forced exile on one of Tasmania’s smaller offshore islands. Only two residents remained when the government closed the Aboriginal Settlement in 1871. This chapter traces the history of Tasmania’s colonisation from 1803 to 1871 and finds that the British committed acts against the Palawa that meet the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: killings, child removals, and creating conditions unconducive to sustaining life. Tasmania has been cited as one the ‘classical’ cases of genocide, but the finding has also stirred debate. This chapter surveys the historiography of Tasmanian genocide including Raphael Lemkin’s 1940s finding of a clear case of genocide; Henry Reynolds’ 2001 counter evidence of gubernatorial humanitarianism; and the subsequent histories that recognise genocide within the structure of settler colonialism. This chapter concludes that the British committed genocide in Tasmania with intent, but reported and framed that crime within the rhetoric, and even the guidelines, of contemporaneous humanitarian policies.

By 1837 the British government had been sending convicts, soldiers, and livestock entrepreneurs to Australia for almost fifty years. A committee of its own House of Commons, inspired by humanitarian principles, now reported the devastating effects on the indigenous inhabitants. Evidence of ‘extermination’ and ‘extirpation’ meant that the best minds of the Colonial Office were already exercised by the devastation of indigenous peoples inflicted by settlers who might have no clear aim of damaging them. When British government was extended to New Zealand, it was soon evident that Māori, for centuries sharing a largely common language and history, had a more effective capacity to resist than Aboriginal Australians, for millennia divided into hundreds of separate peoples and languages. In all Australian colonies and New Zealand, the determination of immigrants to ‘make productive’ land they knew belonged to others created disaster. Within twenty years of settlement, the Aboriginal population of Victoria declined by eighty percent. As the British spread over the whole continent, countless nations were extinguished. Across the Tasman the indigenous population was halved and the ‘passing of the Māori’ was still openly discussed even as adaptation, intermarriage and parliamentary representation saved it from genocide.

The canon of British First World War poetry seems well established and beyond dispute with a set of key ‘representative’ poets referenced continuously. Yet these poets have been selected and promoted over the decades for various reasons. Moreover, how representative were they of the British experience and reaction to the events 1914–1918? Using a quantitative study of the poets and poems appearing in anthologies during and after the war, this essay reconsiders the true canon of the British poetical response to the war charting the rise (and fall) of certain poets and why this might be so. It also considers the hidden canon of poetry that focuses on other theatres of war, at sea and in the air.

This chapter explores the growing significance of religious affiliation in shaping the identity politics of racialised minorities. Specifically, the chapter addresses the growing significance of Islam in shaping both the public reaction to religious diversity and how the identity politics of Islamic faith reshaped a very different alternative public sphere. The chapter addresses how intersectionalities of diaspora, race, faith, gender, and geopolitics land in place, in the specific history of the East End of London. The chapter describes how diasporic Bangladeshi politics emerges in a transactional relationship with the local state in the East End. But what it means to be British and Bangladeshi, or white and ‘East Ender’, is subject to significant change at the same time. Racialisation and religion combine to shape both white and British Bangladeshi collective identities in nuanced ways. The chapter argues that what was commonly represented as isolation or withdrawal from the mainstream of political participation by a certain fraction of some minority Bangladeshi demographics was nothing of the sort.

The relative freedom and political stability of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain produced an intellectual milieu amenable to advances in the natural sciences and philosophy. The major theme of British psychological thought was empirical, emphasizing knowledge acquired through sensation. The mechanism of this acquisition process was association. Founded by Hobbes but fully articulated by Locke, British empiricism retained the necessity of the mind construct while underlining the importance of sensations. Berkeley, Hume, and Hartley evolved skeptical positions concerning the reality of matter and mind that could have left the British movement in the same sterile position as French sensationalism. In addition, James Mill, although he was somewhat salvaged by the utilitarian influence, reduced associations to mental compounding. However, the Scottish common sense writers succeeded in restoring empiricism to a more flexible and open-ended position that recognized complex and integrative psychological phenomena. Thus, the later empiricism of John Stuart Mill, while adhering to scientific inductive methods, adopted a broadly based model of psychology that viewed mental operations and physiological processes as complementary and necessary dimensions of psychological inquiry. By the nineteenth century British philosophy was providing strong support for the study of psychology.

Translation was often an extended arm of writing commentaries in the Indian Ocean littoral. In the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, translating Shāfiʿī texts gave many jurists the best ways to vernacularise Islam and its laws, while for many others it provided a tool to understand the laws of the people their states had subjugated. There were similarities as much as differences among these two streams. Processes of cultural translations united the two, while vernacularisation and colonisation divided them. This chapter identifies four stages of translations that advanced the Shāfiʿī textual longue durée: two Afrasian and two European. It demonstrates their nuances in and around the Indian Ocean in an integrated perspective in which Asian, African and European fuqahā estates appear as interpreters, translators and colonisers to meet their specific needs and necessities of their audience, state, language and law. This chapter takes all the major texts we have discussed in the book to analyse the contemporaneous processes of translations in Afro-Eurasian terrains.

The introduction raises the intricate cross-influences among ninetheenth-century science, paganism, and the arts by noting the many renowned experts whose bodies are buried at Holywell Cemetary, Oxford. These include Walter Pater, Kenneth Grahame, botanist George Claridge Druce, zoologist George Rolleson, Celtic scholar John Rhys, Egyptologist Francis Llewellyn Griffith, and comparative philologist Max Müller. This intermingling of earth sciences, paganism, and the arts, I argue, captures the ecological foundations of decadence, despite its more popular conception as defined by artifice, dandyism, and shocking non-conformity. The final section of the itnroduction summarizes the monograph’s chapters.

This chapter is divided into five sections. Firstly, it situates the origins of Sikhism within the historical traditions of northern India. This is followed by an examination of how the new tradition was gradually institutionalised to accommodate its growing appeal in the century after Nanak’s birth. It then assesses the turn to militancy from the end of the seventeenth century onwards, the creation of the Khalsa and the related question of political sovereignty. This is followed by an outline of how the turn to militancy triggered the process of state formation in the eighteenth century which climaxed in the creation of Ranjit Singh’s empire. Finally, the chapter reflects on the impact of the British Raj on the rise of modern Sikh identity with reference to the colonial discourses of Sikhs as a ‘nation’ and Sikhism as a ‘world religion’.

This chapter examines the Muslim League’s demand for Pakistan after the passing of the Lahore Resolution in March 1940 and the drive for independence by the Congress – processes which turned the Sikh world upside down. It examines Sikh leaderships’ opposition to the division of the Punjab and its articulation of a minority nationalism that accommodated a multicultural, consociationalism governance in a multi-religious and multi-ethnic (resized) province. It assesses how the failure to reach an agreement between the Congress and the Muslim League, and the determination of the British government to cede power to only two dominions, led the Sikh leadership to then demand a Sikh state, and then, as violence engulfed the province, to ensure the ethnic consolidation of the community in East Punjab. The partition holocaust revived memories of persecution and massacres in the eighteenth century, permanently dividing the Sikhs’ homeland and holy land. It would also shape profoundly the outlook of the community in post-independence India and abroad after 1947.