Cambridge University Press eBooks

Historians and political scientists typically examine Keynesianism as an economic doctrine suitable for industrialised nation-states. This Element studies intergovernmental organisations as central to the discussion and globalisation of Keynesian ideas. It provides a historical survey of how Keynes's work and the Keynesian macroeconomics it inspired impacted the League of Nations and the United N…

This book traces the shifting contours of caste and agrarian inequality, revealing how older hierarchies are being reconfigured in new forms and how they impact democracy. It offers a compelling ethnographic account of how democratic mechanisms-including political participation, elections, and protest movements-actually function in rural India. Focusing on Indian Punjab, it reveals the often star…

Becoming Agarwal shows how a close-knit elite mercantile caste is reproduced as a privileged urban player in 'new' Hindu India. At this historical juncture, the baniya community is at the helm of not only economic but also political power. Drawing on in-depth interviews with ninety-one interlocutors, analysis of the oldest Hindi newsletter produced in Delhi over two decades, and ethnographic obse…

The book offers a rich historical study of goods and commodities in modern India, focusing on three iconic objects, namely the Godrej Storwel, the office chair, and the refrigerator. It pays close attention to the larger material context in which manufacturing experiments were undertaken by a premier business house, namely Godrej & Boyce, whose goods became household names, and were sought af…

Attunement to Others explores how contemporary Indian fiction engages with the crises of the Anthropocene through narrative practices of relationality and care. Reading the works of Arundhati Roy, Nilanjana Roy, Amitav Ghosh, Vandana Singh, Avinuo Kire, and Janice Pariat, Amit R. Baishya shows how these texts register the Anthropocene not as a singular rupture, but as a 'polycrisis' marked by eco…

In 2013 and the years that followed, a series of attacks unfolded across India, Pakistan and Bangladesh – attributed to militant Hindu nationalist, Islamist, and sometimes complicit state actors – targeting irreligious dissenters. These included the murder of rationalist leader Narendra Dabholkar in India, the machete attacks on 'atheist bloggers' in Bangladesh, and the death sentence imposed on …

The purpose of this Element is twofold. First, it offers an up-to-date introduction to Paleo-Hebrew inscriptions. Second, it argues that the wealth of information they yield about ancient Israel and Judah is underappreciated and needs to be reevaluated. To these ends, it first briefly retraces the slow rediscovery of the Paleo-Hebrew script by modern scholars from the Renaissance onward and shows…

This ambitious history of industrial and cultural revolution illuminates the formation of a new idiom of energy and economy in nineteenth-century America. In 1851, Ralph Waldo Emerson made an arduous journey to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There, in a series of lectures, he articulated modern ideas of industrial power, the soul's economy, and a value system premised on a new set of prime movers, fos…