Italian Scholars on India, Vol. II - History, Economy, Society (ed. by Elisabetta Basile & Michelguglielmo Torri) (original) (raw)
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Indian Studies in Italy: a slow and continuous improvement, amidst many difficulties
Italian Scholars on India: History, Economy, Society, edited by Elisabetta Basile and Michelguglielmo Torri, 2022
This essay – which is published as an introduction to a collective work including some notable contributions by Italian scholars to the history, anthropology and political economy of India – analyses the development of Indian studies in Italy. Indian studies are defined as the studies of India by making use of the tools of the social sciences, in particularly history, but also political economy/economics, anthropology, sociology, modern literatures, etc. This essay focusses on the contribution of historians, anthropologist and economists, leaving aside the (important) contributions of other disciplines – in particular modern Indian literatures – as they are analysed elsewhere. It points out how Indian studies in Italy – which started much later than Indological studies – after a false dawn in the 1940s, got going in earnest in the late 1960s, spearheaded by historians, later followed by anthropologists, economists and students of modern literatures. Although – for reasons analysed in this essay – it is difficult to speak of either an Italian school or Italian schools of Indian studies, three main currents can be identified as made up by scholars who were influenced, directly or indirectly, to a larger or lesser extent, by the research work and/or the teaching of some clearly identifiable scholars. A first current is related to Giorgio Borsa ((1912-2002) and one of his pupils, Michelguglielmo Torri. Borsa and Torri see the history of India as characterized by continuous change and progress, the end result of the autonomous effort of local élites and intellectuals who, often reacting to external challenges or domination, showed the ability to borrow from outside and creatively rethink and rework non-Indian ideologies and political and economic organisational models. A second current is related to Enrico Fasana (1940-2008), who emphasized the importance of tradition and saw traditional Indian society as the «real» India. While aware of the processes of change which effected Indian society, Fasana saw them in a negative light, as detrimental to «real» India. A third current is related to Elisabetta Basile, who, in her analysis of contemporary India’s political economy, sees it as dominated by a regressive and authoritarian form of capitalism, which, although characterised by flexibility and a high rate of production, has, as its distinguishing feature, the structural inclusion of many of those social regulations and non-market features supposedly bound to be dissolved by capitalism. After analysing Borsa’s, Torri’s, Fasana’s and Basile’s contributions, this essay dwells on the output of the scholars who were influenced by them. It also points out the cases in which the original influence was rethought by these younger scholars in the light of the influence of other, non-Italian senior scholars and/or their own research work.
The Historical and Socio-Cultural Connections Between Italy and India
International Journal of Contemporary Issues Vol. 1(1) Apr-Jun, 2013, 2013
Even if at a first sight India and Italy may appear two very distant countries, both geographically and culturally, history has demonstrated that Indians and Italians have tried several times to create some points of contact. Religion, philosophy, language, geography, social system are some aspects characterizing this intense relation, which has been more or less intense depending on historical context and situations. The main objective of this paper, with a particular Italian point of view, is to present the historical and cultural bonds between the two countries starting from 1st and 2nd centuries AD when trade between India and Rome flourished. The Indian influence during Roman Empire was very high and it will be demonstrated through several examples, in order to understand how Indian impact remained strong also during the next centuries in the Italian peninsula. One of the main objectives that led Europeans to great geographical discoveries was the search of an alternative way to reach India and its markets. In this epochal moment for Europe many Italian voyagers were the main protagonists. A point of change is represented by the beginning of the great season of Christian Catholic evangelization when Hinduism and Buddhism started to be judged in a different manner than in the past. In this context are presented the approaches to India by some Italian missionaries. The last part of the paper is characterized by the analysis of the Italian attitude during 19th and 20th centuries, a period of Indian decline when the Asian country was ruled by British. In this context there are many cultural and scientific linkages but for a strong political cooperation it must be waited the period after Indian independence. The paper ends with the presentation of the main aspects of contemporary connection between India and Italy with the expectation that both nations will be able to rediscover each other, in order to put these two distant countries more closer as was during the past centuries.
Italians in India, 1860-1920 : trades, traders, trading networks
2008
Defence date: 10/12/2008Examining Board: Prof. Diogo Ramada Curto (EUI); Prof. Claudio Zanier (University of Pisa); Prof. Anthony Molho (EUI); Prof. Costas Lapavitsas (SOAS, School of Oriental and African Studies)PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digital archive of EUI PhD thesesThis work deals with the economic and commercial activities of Italian traders in British India from the 1860s to the 1920s. When confronted with the problem of selecting which type of traders I had to include in my study I choose to work on silk and coral traders. A general study on all the Italian traders active in India would have required much more time, and more archival research, both beyond the possibilities of a doctoral student. The rational behind this choice is explained in detail in chapter 2. Silk and coral traders have been taken as representative of the Italian way of doing business, or at least of the Italian ways of doing business in India between the 19th and 20th centuries
Mapping Italian Entrepreneurial Commercial Presence in the 19TH Century India
ata.boun.edu.tr
This paper is part of a broader survey on the commercial activities of Italian and Greek traders in the 19 th century South Asia. It specifically focuses on the expansion of Italian-run business enterprises on the Indian subcontinent, mapping their presence and briefly illustrating their trading activities. The main goal of this paper is thus to give an overview of the commercial traffics handled by Italian traders, proposing a concise exploration of their trading networks, and pointing out some relevant issues related to their presence in South Asia, such as the strategies they adopted to place themselves in the Indian economic environment, and to face the challenge of being external traders in marketplace apparently dominated by British firms; the relationships Italian traders developed with native mercantile communities and financial elite, and the way they interacted with them; the way Italia long-standing commercial tradition helped them in successfully entering the trading circuits of the Indian Ocean and in working satisfactorily within them.
How Should We Approach the Economy of ‘Early Modern India’? A Review Article
Modern Asian Studies, 2015
Tirthankar Roy’s recent synthesis on the economic history of early modern India claims to provide a new, overarching narrative placing this period within the broader sweep of the history of what Roy defines as ‘capitalism’ in India in the very long term. This paper provides a detailed critique of Roy’s monograph, suggesting that it suffers from some serious methodological deficits, arising not least from a future-oriented paradigm that imposes anachronistic concepts on this period, including the very notion of ‘India’. Furthermore, his view of the economy as being fundamentally driven forward by the rise of a coastal polity expanding inwards from Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta, sits awkwardly with his repeated claim that colonialism was of little significance for Indian economic history. Finally, the present paper suggests that this period might be more fruitfully approached not only by abandoning the telos of what we know of India’s future, but also by adopting both regionally-focused and comparative approaches, turning away from long-distance trade as the primary lens through which to view the economy, and instead examining endogenous factors in the economies of individual regions and enriching our understanding of them by reference to studies of other world regions with comparable patterns of development in the same period. More nuanced ways of approaching economic change in the very long run, including the importance of developments in modes of consumption and market- and profit-oriented economic behaviour, are suggested as a better means of understanding both the economies of the late pre-colonial centuries in the Indian subcontinent, and the development of capitalism, which should also be understood in a more specific manner than Roy allows.
This volume is the outcome of a conference held at the University of Naples Federico II as a part of the scholarly initiatives of the PRIN 2022 “Myths of Legitimations and Government of Difference in the European Imperial Regimes during the Modern and Contemporary Age”. The participants were invited to offer insights on one among the most crucial core-periphery relationships in 19th-20th-century world history, namely that between the British Empire and its Crown Jewel, India. Through an exploration of the nature of the conflicts as well as the collaboration and negotiation between different nationalisms and the British Empire, the Conference proposed to elucidate five main issues: How did the British Empire manage India’s diversity, and what was the response from Indian society? Has recent his- toriography gone beyond the dichotomous characterization of the British Raj as a project of “divide and rule” or as an impartial arbiter between conflicting communities, as the imperial myth claimed? To what extent were different nationalisms a product of India’s own contradictory mod- ernization, and this in turn an effect of the encounter/clash with the Em- pire? In which sense were India’s nationalist projects genuinely “national” – as opposed to “communal” – and how did they challenge or reinforce the British imperial politics of difference? To what extent has the variegated and internally conflictual nationalist movement in India and the imperial response to it shaped Independent India discourses on national identity and societal conflicts? More specifically, the contributors develop analyses grouped around two perspectives. Firstly, the comparative examination of different “religious” nationalisms, in particular Hindu and Muslim; and, secondly, the role of key figures representing different strands and different phases of the Indian nationalist movement, from Gandhi to Tilak, from Bhagat Singh to Ambedkar. In addition, the concluding essays aim to provide the reader with key elements of the historiographical background of the ongoing debates and controversies about the Indo-British relation- ship, namely the contribution and the evolution of the so called “Cambridge School” of colonial and global history.
egitto dai faraoni agli arabi a t t i d e l c o n v e g n o e g i t t o : a m m i n i s t r a z i o n e , e c o n o m i a , s o c i e t à , c u l t u r a d a i f a r a o n i a g l i a r a b i é g y p t e : a d m i n i s t r a t i o n , é c o n o m i e , s o c i é t é , c u l t u r e d e s p h a r a o n s a u x a r a b e s m i l a n o , u n i v e r s i t à d e g l i s t u d i , 7 -9 g e n n a i o 2 0 1 3 a cura di silvia bussi PISA · ROMA FABRIZIO SERRA EDITORE MMXIII Pubblicato con il contributo prin 2009 e del Dipartimento di Studi letterari, filologici e linguistici dell'Università degli Studi di Milano. *