A Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India

It is impossible to understand how the British came to be British without thinking about how Indians became Indian. To a significant extent colonizers and colonized made each other. In this broad study of British rule in India during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Sudipta Sen takes up this dual agenda, sketching out the interrelationships between nationalism, imperialism, and identity formation as they played out in both England and South Asia. Drawing as it does on the pioneering work of Homi Bhaba, Gayatri Spivak, and others,A Distant Sovereigntydeparts from most purely theoretical interpretations of colonialism in its attention to historical and geographical specificity and its reliance on previously neglected sources. At once sophisticated and rigorous, fresh and thorough, this accessible work closely examines the definitions of nationalism and identity in both South Asia and Great Britain.