Mountstuart Elphinstone in South Asia: Pioneer of British Colonial Rule [Hardcover]

Examines the life of one of the principal intellectual architects of British colonial rule in South Asia.Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779-1859), Lowland Scottish traveller, East India Company civil servant and educator, was one of the principal intellectual architects of British colonial rule in South Asia. Imbued with liberal views, such that Bombay's wealthy founded Elphinstone College in his memory, he pioneered the scholarly, scientific and administrative foundations of imperialism in India.Elphinstone's career was launched when he was picked to lead the inaugural British diplomatic mission to the Afghan court. HisAccount of the Kingdom of Caubul(1815) became the main source of British information about Afghanistan. He is best known for his periods as Resident at Poona and Governor of Bombay in the 1810s and 1820s, when he instituted innovative and lasting policies in administration and education while also conducting research for his extremely influentialHistory of India(1841).This volume examines Mountstuart Elphinstone's intellectual contributions and administrative career in their own right, in relation to prominent contemporaries including Charles Metcalfe and William Moorcroft, and in the context of later historical study of India, Afghanistan, British imperialism and its imperial frontiers.DedicationAcknowledgementsPreface by William DalrympleIntroductionPart I: Mountstuart Elphinstone and An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul1. Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, A Book History of Mountstuart Elphinstone's An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul2. M. Jamil Hanifi, Mountstuart Elphinstone: An Anthropologist Before Anthropology3. Jonathan Lee, The Elphinstone Mission, the 'Kingdom of Caubul' and Turkic world4. Zak Leonard, Muslim Fanaticism as Ambiguous Trope: A Study in Polemical MutationPart II: Mountstuart Elphinstone and His Contemporaries5. Senzil Nawid, The Discovery of Afghanistan in the Era of Imperialism: George Forster, Mountstuart Elphinstone, and Cl5