Chapter 9 suggests how Hinduism and Confucianism may be understood in relation to the construct of transcendentalism in order to set up a discussion of India and China in the final chapter. (Unearthly Powers had largely taken Christianity, Islam and Buddhism as the main examples of transcendentalist traditions.) This involves a consideration of distinct forms that the Axial Age took in both regions and the religious and philosophical traditions that emerged from them. The diverse traditions coming under the umbrellas of Hinduism and Confucianism represent very substantial continuity with the immanentist pre-Axial past, especially in a fundamental emphasis on the role of ritual action. However, they also incorporated Axial elements, particularly an emphasis on liberation/salvation in the case of Hinduism and ethical rectitude in the case of Confucianism. Confucianism remains the most awkward fit within the mould of transcendentalism because of the absence of a soteriological imperative.

In its central position, Chapter 4, with its focus on enslaved people, brings together all the aspects discussed in Chapters 2, 3, 5, and 6. It highlights the importance of the enslaved people in Mauritius, both for their labour and as sources of plant knowledge. Making an important contribution to the history of slavery and natural history, it serves as a link between the chapters on staple crops (Chapters 2 and 3) and those on commercial crops (Chapters 5 and 6), because it elaborates on both types of crops in relation to slavery. In particular, Chapter 4 reveals the disconnects of knowledge circulation. It seeks to explain what happened when new and unknown crops were introduced and knowledge of their cultivation or preparation techniques was lacking or faulty. Lastly, this chapter focuses on the Bengali slave gardener, Charles Rama. His knowledge of cultivation earned him praise from French actors, and he was later freed because of it. In the same way, the chapter examines the work of the enslaved gardener Hilaire, who initiated and tested the new grafting methods that were adopted by European-trained naturalists in the island. These two cases not only highlight the importance of the enslaved people’s knowledge, but more importantly, they reveal the shortcomings of European plant knowledge within the creolising processes.

Chapter 6 illustrates that household political cooperation begets a system of political organization that centers on men. Using network data from a census survey, it describes the structure of the overall village political network, including gender homophily of political ties, centrality in the entire network, and the average degree of connectivity between individuals and political elites. It shows that village political networks are structured such that men comprise the center of the network, while women remain on the periphery. As a result, influence is concentrated among men, and village politics is structured around men’s other intersecting identities, namely caste. It then compares the size and composition of women’s and men’s political networks and show that women are connected to village politics largely through the men in their household. For men, women do not register as political actors. Household political cooperation thus implies strong limits on women’s access to power, influence, and information and yields a broader gender and political system that perpetuates male dominance.

James Skinner’s 1825 Tashrīh al-Aqwām includes a real-life portrait of the chief hereditary bīn-player to the last Mughal emperors, Miyan Himmat Khan. But the painting was simultaneously intended as an ethnographic archetype. A man of mixed race, Skinner wrote in Persian and drew on multiple precolonial traditions of describing ethnographic “types”. But Skinner’s entry is radically irreconcilable with Himmat Khan’s own biography and intellectual output: a revolutionary co-written music treatise, the Asl al-Usūl. To unravel this baffling discrepancy, I read ethnographic paintings and writings in Persian, Urdu, Hindi, and English against a new wave of Persian music treatises c. 1780−1850. These reveal an incipient Indian modernity in the most authoritative centres of Hindustani music production running alongside colonial knowledge projects.

This chapter tracks the ways in which migration has shaped the South Asian novel. It provides an overview of key writers and novels from South Asia and the "new" diaspora to understand the possibilities and limitations inherent in diaspora as a critical category. Diaspora, as a paradigm, often risks anti-historical or de-historicized readings of literary texts and their deep engagements with history. One may often risk attention to form when diaspora becomes the analytic rubric for the study of the vast body of anglophone South Asian literature. The chapter concentrates on novels that circulate among scholars and readers in the United States, United Kingdom, and to some extent Canada, and concludes by gesturing to what gets left out when diaspora becomes the reigning paradigm for understanding the long and deep history of South Asian literature in English.

Attempts to alter the balance between the Company’s two characters would only intensify in the decade-and-a-half after Wellesley’s departure (1805–20). Ideas about knowledge would continue to feature in these attempts. The Charter Act of 1813 tied the Company’s patronage of scholars to its collection of land revenue. Scholar-officials and their Indian collaborators, meanwhile, tailored their intellectual projects to the aim of territorial expansion. Overall, such expansion was encouraging engagement with Indian society and raising the prospect of involvement in Indian education. The Court of Directors was slow to embrace this prospect. But by the 1820s, the need for new ideas about knowledge could not be ignored any longer.

Chapter 4 examines how neoliberal development in West Bengal affected various identity markers to explain the marginalization of Bengali Muslims. English and Hindi became the privileged languages of global/national capital, effectively turning Bangla into a provincial, backward language in the popular mind. The decline of class politics and the rise of identity politics brought to the surface a kind of anti-Muslim sentiment informed by caste. The everyday marginalization of Bengali Muslims, on the one hand, relies on caste discrimination and ghrina (disgust) that reinforces the exclusion of Bengali Muslims, and on the other, is a product of conflating Bengali Muslims with Bangladeshis, effectively making them invisible, and hence justifying the lack of safety nets available to them. Using a variety of qualitative methods and a comparative analysis between West Bengal and Bangladesh regarding the hold of Bengali culture in the contemporary period, the chapter shows the various ways in which neoliberal ideas impact Bengali identity.

The goals of independent India of achieving the constitutional promise of an egalitarian society have largely been led by an emphatic endorsement of the right to equality on one hand, and the implementation of positive discrimination measures, such as caste-based reservations in public employment and education, on the other. The idea of redistributive justice was a common theme often visited in the Constituent Assembly Debates.1 India shares a long history of social and economic oppression with most other countries in the developing world. While the markers for such oppression are often race and socio-economic status, or both, in most parts of the world, in India, caste and tribal identity remain the most important vectors for discriminatory practices and structural inequities.2

Chapter 5 draws on notarial records and census reports (padrones) to track the ethnic language used to describe Afro-descended residents of Veracruz and other Gulf Coast cities and towns. Comparing this data to published studies of other Mexican and Caribbean areas, I argue distinctive African ethnic labels retained meaning in coastal communities longer than they did in the Mexican interior, reflecting patterns of usage in the Caribbean. This was true not only among individuals, but collectively in the form of confraternities. As late as 1667, at least five confraternities in Veracruz continued to use language of African ethnicity, while confraternities elsewhere in Mexico had long since abandoned ethnic language. The final section of the chapter uses the admissions records of the Hospital Nuestra Señora de Loreto to examine the size and shape of Veracruz’s Caribbean-born population. Because the records include birthplace information for the hospital’s predominantly free-black women who were its patients between 1684 and 1695, they allow us to understand more tangibly the intersections of Mexican-Caribbean networks and ethnic labeling.

Du Bois edited and wrote the introductory chapter to the NAACP document An Appeal to the World: A Statement of Denial of Rights to Minorities, submitted to the United Nations in October 1947. In his introduction, he argued that the “color caste system” had been disastrous for American democracy. After the North’s victory in the Civil War, Northern capitalism’s financial stake in cheap slave labor led it to participate in enforcing a racial caste system keeping African Americans in economic and political subjugation. The domination of the American economy by big business and monopolies on land and natural resources explain why democracy has been crippled throughout the country, with mass disenfranchisement of African Americans and many whites, especially in the South. The denial of African Americans’ right to vote means a failure of democracy in the world’s leading democracy and in the world. The disproportionate power granted the most anti-democratic elements in American society perverted American foreign policy in favor of imperialism, against the League of Nations, and against weaker nations. With the UN based in New York, American racial discrimination infringes the rights of all peoples and has become a matter of international concern.

Ancient and medieval India (prior to ca. 1600) produced a vast literature dealing with the nature of the human being, the proper ordering of society, and ethical and legal norms. Sanskrit sources tend to emphasize special dignities belonging to particular statuses according to a divinely ordained class hierarchy (varṇa-dharma). But in some contexts we hear of universally shared aspects of the human condition. Ascetic and devotional movements call into question special dignities tied to ascriptive rank. Sanskrit texts on good governance formulate general standards of justice and equity that could cut across or bypass rank. Thus, Hindu sources illustrate how ethical and legal orders find ways to compartmentalize: to recognize that all people can share basic capacities does not automatically sweep the field clear of status dignity. This essay draws on Jeremy Waldron’s concept of human dignity as a status claim that “levels up” by attributing to all people a dignity once reserved for a privileged few. We note Hindu examples of a similar approach, as well as examples of “leveling down” by pointing out the hypocrisy of elites while extolling the virtues of which the lowly are capable.