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Opium was a major cash-crop in nineteenth-century India. Over a million peasants cultivated poppy for the British-Indian government, which held a monopoly over the production of the drug and could thus keep the prices paid to the cultivators at an extremely low level. The major question this paper seeks to answer is why so many peasants cultivated this laborious crop despite a clear lack of financial incentives. This problem is tackled by applying two approaches from development economics, i. e. interlinked transactions and Kaushi Basu’s triadic relations model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The German indophilia between 1790 and 1820 is an impressive example for the contemporary project of an encompassing and relational historiography of mankind. India became an important reference point within the process of German cultural self-assurance and positioning. Here, especially pictures, drawings and poetic forms of expression played a crucial role and they clarify a pictorial style of early German ethnography itself. This article's detailed analysis of ethnographic pictures of India illuminates a figurative and relational entanglement between Indian and European contexts. The visual practices of cutting, pasting and transferring shed light on colonial structures, political exchange and identity politics. Within these tense figurations the ethnographic picture composes a particular knowledge, which centrally relies on visualized categories that have to be ‚typical‘, ‚ideal‘, and ‚characteristic‘. Hence, early ethnography has to be understood as both a text-picturegenre and a research activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]