POL304Y5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Louis Dumont, Nicholas Dirks, Ayesha Jalal
Document Summary
The sun never set on the briish empire. 1757 is the year during which the batle of plassey occurred, because the briish were able to defeat the bengalis (?) Ayesha jalal, democracy and authoritarianism in south asia. Before the briish came, a succession of empire builders had match the contours of poliical india with the geographical idea of india (hindustan or bharat) Poliical unity conceived in the impersonal raionality of bureaucraic insituions could neither relect, nor capture, the internal dynamics of a society accustomed to direct, personalized rule. (p. 10) India was never a uniied country in the past, because they were just muliple empires. Empires vs naion-state: empires have the potenial to grow, whereas a naion-state is deined by a border; also kind of federal. India and pakistan didn"t make sense to the people of the region, because they were unused to the idea of the naion-state, historically speaking. The briish made the region into a naion-state.
