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Author : Jessica Patterson
Release : 2021-12-16
Genre : History
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 638/5 ( reviews)
Book Synopsis Religion, Enlightenment and Empire by : Jessica Patterson
Download or read book Religion, Enlightenment and Empire written by Jessica Patterson. This book was released on 2021-12-16. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores British interpretations of Hinduism at a crucial period in the East India Company's conquest of Bengal.
Author : Jessica Patterson
Release : 2021-12-16
Genre : Political Science
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 536/5 ( reviews)
Book Synopsis Religion, Enlightenment and Empire by : Jessica Patterson
Download or read book Religion, Enlightenment and Empire written by Jessica Patterson. This book was released on 2021-12-16. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the second half of the eighteenth century, several British East India Company servants published accounts of what they deemed to be the original and ancient religion of India. Drawing on what are recognised today as the texts and traditions of Hinduism, these works fed into a booming enlightenment interest in Eastern philosophy. At the same time, the Company's aggressive conquest of Bengal was facing a crisis of legitimacy and many of the prominent political minds of the day were turning their attention to the question of empire. In this original study, Jessica Patterson situates these Company works on the 'Hindu religion' in the twin contexts of enlightenment and empire. In doing so, she uncovers the central role of heterodox religious approaches to Indian religions for enlightenment thought, East India Company policy, and contemporary ideas of empire.
Author : Sankar Muthu
Release : 2009-01-10
Genre : Philosophy
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 881/5 ( reviews)
Book Synopsis Enlightenment against Empire by : Sankar Muthu
Download or read book Enlightenment against Empire written by Sankar Muthu. This book was released on 2009-01-10. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late eighteenth century, an array of European political thinkers attacked the very foundations of imperialism, arguing passionately that empire-building was not only unworkable, costly, and dangerous, but manifestly unjust. Enlightenment against Empire is the first book devoted to the anti-imperialist political philosophies of an age often regarded as affirming imperial ambitions. Sankar Muthu argues that thinkers such as Denis Diderot, Immanuel Kant, and Johann Gottfried Herder developed an understanding of humans as inherently cultural agents and therefore necessarily diverse. These thinkers rejected the conception of a culture-free "natural man." They held that moral judgments of superiority or inferiority could be made neither about entire peoples nor about many distinctive cultural institutions and practices. Muthu shows how such arguments enabled the era's anti-imperialists to defend the freedom of non-European peoples to order their own societies. In contrast to those who praise "the Enlightenment" as the triumph of a universal morality and critics who view it as an imperializing ideology that denigrated cultural pluralism, Muthu argues instead that eighteenth-century political thought included multiple Enlightenments. He reveals a distinctive and underappreciated strand of Enlightenment thinking that interweaves commitments to universal moral principles and incommensurable ways of life, and that links the concept of a shared human nature with the idea that humans are fundamentally diverse. Such an intellectual temperament, Muthu contends, can broaden our own perspectives about international justice and the relationship between human unity and diversity.
Author : Peter Gottschalk
Release : 2013
Genre : History
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 015/5 ( reviews)
Book Synopsis Religion, Science, and Empire by : Peter Gottschalk
Download or read book Religion, Science, and Empire written by Peter Gottschalk. This book was released on 2013. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peter Gottschalk offers a compelling study of how, through the British implementation of scientific taxonomy in the subcontinent, Britons and Indians identified an inherent divide between mutually antagonistic religious communities. England's ascent to power coincided with the rise of empirical science as an authoritative way of knowing not only the natural world, but the human one as well. The British scientific passion for classification, combined with the Christian impulse to differentiate people according to religion, led to a designation of Indians as either Hindu or Muslim according to rigidly defined criteria that paralleled classification in botanical and zoological taxonomies. Through an historical and ethnographic study of the north Indian village of Chainpur, Gottschalk shows that the Britons' presumed categories did not necessarily reflect the Indians' concepts of their own identities, though many Indians came to embrace this scientism and gradually accepted the categories the British instituted through projects like the Census of India, the Archaeological Survey of India, and the India Museum. Today's propogators of Hindu-Muslim violence often cite scientistic formulations of difference that descend directly from the categories introduced by imperial Britain. Religion, Science, and Empire will be a valuable resource to anyone interested in the colonial and postcolonial history of religion in India.
Author : Nina Reid-Maroney
Release : 2001
Genre : History
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : /5 ( reviews)
Book Synopsis Philadelphia's Enlightenment, 1740-1800 by : Nina Reid-Maroney
Download or read book Philadelphia's Enlightenment, 1740-1800 written by Nina Reid-Maroney. This book was released on 2001. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rather than treating the Great Awakening and the Enlightenment as defining opposites in 18th century American culture, this study argues that the imperatives of the great revival actually shaped the pursuit of enlightened science. Reid-Maroney traces the interwoven histories of the two movements by reconstructing the intellectual world of the Philadelphia circle. Prophets of the Enlightenment had long tried to resolve pressing questions about the limitations of human reason and the sources of our knowledge about the created order of things. The leaders of the Awakening addressed those questions with a new urgency and, in the process, determined the character of the Enlightenment emerging in Philadelphia's celebrated culture of science. Tracing the influence of evangelical sensibility and the development of a Calvinist parallel to the philosophical skepticism of enlightened Scots, Reid-Maroney finds that the Philadelphians' love of science rested on a radical critique of human reason, even while it acknowledged that reason was the dignifying and distinguishing property of human nature. Benjamin Rush alluded to an enlightenment wrought by grace in his image of the Kingdom of Christ and the Empire of Reason. In the post-Revolutionary period, the redemptive Enlightenment of the Philadelphia circle reached its greatest cultural power as a vision for scientific progress in the new republic.
