Summary

This lecture examines how ideas – especially radical political, economic and social ideas- travelled across empires and how and why they were transformed and lodged in locales with very different cultural and intellectual inheritances. There have been several books on colonial knowledge, broadly understood, over the last few years, including works by Karuna Mantena, Duncan Bell, Duncan Kelly and others. I also published a book on this topic, Empire and information in the 1990s. But the ideas of those who wished to drastically change colonial governance or even abolish it altogether have only been examined to a lesser extent, though Gregory Claeys has provided a useful general overview for the later-nineteenth century.

My own analysis will begin in the earlier part of the century, the age of revolution and constitutions, considering not only the French revolution itself, but also the impact on the colonial world of the Iberian constitutions. Following this, the lecture will examine the global transmission and appropriation of nationalism, idealism and religion towards the end of the nineteenth century. It will end by briefly re-considering the concepts of the human, the state and the international order in the era of decolonisation. Many of my examples will be taken from South Asia, but I will point to parallels and analogies elsewhere. The lecture will try to propose a methodology whereby we can bring together intellectual history with the political and social history of empires with out ‘reducing’ one of these components to the other.

Professor Sir C. A. Bayly é Professor Emérito de Imperial and Naval History e Director do South Asian Studies Centre, da Universidade de Cambridge, Reino Unido. É autor de uma obra vasta e profundamente influente que redefiniu o campo dos estudos asiáticos e da história imperial e, mais recentemente, abriu novos caminhos para uma nova história global. Os seus livros incluem Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars (1983), Imperial Meridian (1989), Empire and Information (1996), The Birth of the Modern World (2004), Recovering Liberties (2012).