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This article seeks to establish the value of the concept of cosmotopia to historians of intercultural connections through presenting a case study of the Calcutta Unitarian Committee, which was active between 1821 and 1828. In tandem, it aims to enhance understanding of the origins of one particularly sustained set of intercultural connections: the interfaith network which developed between an influential group of Hindu religious and social reformers, the Brahmo Samaj, and western Unitarian Christians. The article focusses on the collaboration between the two leading figures on the Committee: Rammohun Roy, the renowned founder of the Brahmo Samaj, who is often described as the Father of Modern India; and William Adam, a Scottish Baptist missionary who was condemned as the “second fallen Adam” after his “conversion” to Unitarianism by Rammohun Roy, and who went on to cofound a utopian community in the United States. It explores the Calcutta Unitarian Committee's activities within the cosmopolitan milieu of early colonial Calcutta, and clarifies its role in the emergence of the Brahmo Samaj, in the development of a unique approach to Christian mission among Unitarians, and in laying the foundations of a transnational network whose members were in the vanguard of religious innovation, radical social reform, and debates on the “woman question” in nineteenth-century India, Britain, and the United States. In conclusion, the article draws on the case study to offer some broader reflections on the relationship between utopianism, cosmopolitanism, and colonialism.

This is an impressively detailed and rich study of the history of the education of girls and women in colonial India, based on extensive archival research in a range of localities. The book spans a...

Sometime in the 1980s, two elderly people embarked on a collaboration; a collaboration that affirmed half a lifetime of political fellowship and personal friendship. The result was an English-language book Gandhi. His Gift of the Fight. The lives of Marjorie Sykes and Jehangir P. Patel gain historical timbre in the interstices of the larger tale they seek to tell. Two lives take shape in ways that unravel the binaries informing taken-for-granted assumptions about the colonial. They offer a case study of cosmopolitanisms that provincialises the European concept. These provincial cosmopolitanisms did not need to reject a sense of patriotism as a pernicious parochialism. Instead, they inscribed patriotism and nationalism into universalisms that challenged the assumed universalism of European imperialism.

The legacies of colonialism continue to resonate, in a new era of intensified globalisation that once again places race and religion at the centre of a search for peaceful co-existence. This book looks back to the period 1860–1950 in order to grasp how alternative visions of amity and co-existence were forged between people of faith, within but resistant to imperial contact zones. This chapter contextualises our argument that networks of faith and friendship played a vital role in forging new vocabularies of cosmopolitanism that presaged the post-imperial world of the 1950s.

In the penultimate chapter, this book turns to a range of cosmopolitan internationalisms active in transnational networks of the interwar Pacific. Indian and Australian cosmopolitans who were visitors in each other’s countries and delegates at the same international conferences epitomise the mobility and interpersonal exchange that characterises many of the cosmopolitan thought zones discussed in previous chapters. While their international activities in the interwar Pacific, linking interpersonal cosmopolitanisms with the ideal of world government in this era, offer further insight into the range of shared if also divergent grounds upon which cosmopolitanism thought zones formed and through which a variety of interconnected post-imperial worlds continued to be imagined following World War 1.

This chapter explores the cosmopolitan life of the little-known English religious liberal, feminist and writer, Sophia Dobson Collet (1822–1894). It examines Collet’s close connection with members of the Brahmo Samaj, a movement founded in 1820s Calcutta by Ram Mohan Roy to promote religious and social reform among Hindus. It shows her pivotal role in shaping a ‘cosmopolitan thought zone’ connecting Brahmos with British and American Unitarians, Transcendentalists, Theists and liberal Christians. Collet, it argues, enacted spiritual fellowship and a shared commitment to social reform within a respectful trans-racial and trans-faith affective community. Although she did not articulate an anti-imperial politics, she was committed to bridging the racialised divisions and hierarchies that characterised the ‘imperial social formation’ between Britain and India.

Henry Polak (1882–1959), a British-born lawyer, journalist and editor of Indian Opinion, campaigned with Mohandas Gandhi against restrictions on South African Indians and against the indentured labour system. Founder of the Indian Overseas Association in 1920, he worked with Indians across the diaspora against racism and discriminations. Most in tune with Indian political liberals, he worked with them for Indian independence. His life of border-crossings and his affective cosmopolitanism were inspired by his spiritual cosmopolitanism. His reading across cosmopolitan thought zones saw his embrace of Theosophy and universal equality. He drew strong links between Theosophical beliefs and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

This five-volume collection of primary source material, edited by Pramod K. Nayar and co-published by Routledge and Edition Synapse, reproduces a total of 177 original documents relating to women i...

This article, offering a transnational perspective on Mary Carpenter's promotion of female education in colonial India, seeks to foster the writing of new histories of social reform in the nineteenth-century world and fresh analyses of global women's history in the age of empire. It roots Carpenter's engagement with India in her involvement in a transoceanic web of British, Indian and American religious liberals and social reformers and explores the ways in which her promotion of Indian women's education was shaped in interaction with members of an influential Bengali socio-religious reform movement, the Brahmo Samaj. Presenting the resultant push to found training schools for women teachers as a project of cross-cultural collaboration, it argues that this cannot be adequately subsumed under the rubric of colonial reform, and did not simply relegate Indian women to the position of silent victims who needed to be saved.

Women in Transnational History offers a range of fresh perspectives on the field of women's history, exploring how cross-border connections and global developments since the nineteenth century have shaped diverse women's lives and the gendered social, cultural, political and economic histories of specific localities.

This article traces the history of the commemoration in Britain, India, and America of leading Bengali religious and social reformer, Rammohun Roy, from his death in Britain in 1833 through to the publication of the first substantial account of his life and work in 1900. It reveals the vital part that commemorative processes played in creating a sense of imagined community among liberal religious groups who were in the vanguard of social reform movements in India, Britain, and the United States. The groups under consideration are the Brahmo Samaj, an organization founded by Roy to reform Hinduism, and Unitarians, Protestant dissenters who rejected the orthodox Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity and the evangelical approach to missionary work. Bridging the study of transatlantic and imperial networks, the article explores a culture of commemoration that emphasized affinity rather than difference between groups whose members were unequally positioned in colonial discourse as on opposite sides of the colonizer–colonized, Hindu–Christian, and East–West divides. It exposes the commemoration of Roy as a complex and contested process, creating both ‘localized’ and ‘globalized’ collective memories. These reveal the possibilities for, and limitations on, cross-cultural interchange in an age of global Christian mission and British imperial power.

Identities and Histories: women's writing and politics in Bengal SARMISTHA DUTTA GUPTA Kolkata: Stree (an imprint of Bhatkal and Sen), 2010 Pp. xii + 294. 700.00 Rupees. ISBN 8190676024; ISBN 97881...

This article explores English women's important contributions to the campaign against sati (widow-burning) in India. It investigates how they attempted to eradicate sati through supporting missionary activity and female education in India, and through petitioning Parliament in Britain. English women's involvement in this campaign, which was contemporaneous with their involvement in the anti-slavery movement, has hitherto been ignored by historians. The research presented in this article offers new perspectives on the meaning of female emancipation within an evangelical and imperial framework. Taken alongside work on the anti-slavery movement, it adds to ourunderstanding of early nineteenth-century female philanthropy throughclarifying the imperial dimensions of ‘women's mission to women’. It alsooffers new insights into women's relationship to politics in the period, and into the origins of ‘imperial feminism’

(1996). Slave sugar boycotts, female activism and the domestic base of British anti‐slavery culture. Slavery & Abolition: Vol. 17, No. 3, pp. 137-162.

Elizabeth Heyrick's 1824 pamphlet Immediate, not Gradual Abolition challenged the policy of amelioration and gradual emancipation adopted by the Anti-Slavery Society in Britain at its foundation in 1823, setting in motion debates that led to a fundamental shift in abolitionist policy in both Britain and the US. This chapter traces the religious wellsprings of Heyrick's outspoken radical abolitionism. It explores the roots in the milieu of late eighteenth-century provincial rational dissent, where religious and political radicalism were interlinked. It then examines the ways in which her radicalism was strengthened and sustained through her subsequent involvement in the Society of Friends at a time when Quaker women were asserting spiritual leadership through searing critiques of the increasing ‘worldliness’ of the male leaders of the Society.

In seeking to demand equal rights with men while revaluing the ’feminine’ and to foster political alliances among women whose present positions are manifestly unequal, contemporary feminists confront difficult dilemmas. In this essay I bring a historical perspective to bear on these issues through an exploration of women’s participation in the British anti-slavery movement and its links to the development of feminism in the period between the 1780s and the 1860s. Drawing on my research into women anti-slavery campaigners in Britain, I explore two different but interrelated boundaries which women’s involvement in anti-slavery created both opportunities for, and obstacles to, crossing.’ The first boundary separated the private circles of homes and families from the public and political arenas outside; it was a gender-based boundary which women abolitionists and feminists attempted in various ways to cross.2 The second boundary divided women by assigning them to different and unequal social categories; separating white from black and ‘free’ from enslaved, it was a racially defined boundary which female antislavery campaigners attempted to some extent to challenge.3 This essay is arranged in four sections. In the first I trace the uneven development of the link between anti-slavery and feminism in Britain. In the following sections I successively explore the meanings of the terminology of ‘duties’ and ‘rights’, of feminine ’privilege’, and of sisterhood in which white middle-class British women abolitionists couched their opposition to the enslavement of black women. Finally, I discuss some of the issues this study raises concerning ‘maternalist’ and ’egalitarian’ strands in both abolitionism and feminism. In exploring these issues the essay as a whole raises questions about the nature of feminism, the meanings of sisterhood, and the precise historical interconnections between domestic and colonial politics and ideology.

This chapter focuses on women's metropolitan-based activism on imperial issues in the period between the 1790s and the outbreak of the Second World War. The women concerned are mainly British-born, white and middle or upper class as it was from this sector of the population that the leadership for most empire-focused campaigns came. However, there is also some consideration of white working-class women's relationship to these campaigns, and of both white colonial women and black and Asian women who were active within or without these movements, and often challenged hegemonic discourses. Discussion concentrates on women's activism within organisations with a specifically imperial focus, rather than imperial activism within the organised feminist movement or the relationship between feminism and imperialism, aspects of which are covered in chapters by Jane Rendall and Keith McClelland and Sonya Rose. The chapter covers a long time-span, which saw major developments both in the politics of empire and in women's relationship to public life and politics. It explores the interconnecting dynamics of these two arenas of change through discussing women's involvement in movements aiming to reform the Empire and the colonised, in organisations promoting support for imperialism, and in anti-imperial and anti-racist activism. Chronologically, these campaigns overlapped with each other, but they peaked in succeeding periods: the nineteenth century, the Edwardian period and the interwar period respectively.

Most research on the history of the relationship between British feminism and imperialism has focused on the period between the 1860s and the First World War.1 This is understandable: this was both the period of ‘first wave feminism’ — of the first organized women’s movement — and the period of high or ‘new’ imperialism, when imperial concerns came to the fore in British politics. In the late Victorian and Edwardian period empire also arguably had its greatest impact on the everyday lives of ordinary people in Britain: as John MacKenzie has concluded, ‘the values and beliefs of the imperial world view settled like a sediment in the consciousness of the British people’.2 But what, then, of the period which Jane Rendall and others have identified as seeing the origins of modern feminism in Britain, the 1790s to 1850s?3 This was, after all, a time of immense expansion in British dominion overseas. Around 150 million people came under British control between 1790 and 1820 alone, in territories as widely dispersed as southern Africa, India and Australia. In addition, Christopher Bayly’s persuasive argument that ‘the Regency empire was in an important sense an extension of domestic social change overseas’ alerts us to the importance of exploring the relationship between domestic and imperial developments at this period.4 What, then, can be said about the relationship between Britain’s imperial concerns and British women’s feminist preoccupations during the early nineteenth century?

Between 13 February 1829 and 29 March 1830 a total of fourteen separate groups of women from around England sent petitions to Parliament calling on it to abolish sati, or rather what they described as ‘the practice in India of burning widows on the funeral piles of their husbands’.1 Amongst the earliest examples of female petitioning, and directly preceding women’s more extensive petitioning for the abolition of colonial slavery, this intervention in the political process was taken not by women who identified themselves as radicals or supporters of the ‘rights of women’ but rather by women associated with the evangelical missionary movement. The petitions formed the climax of a broader campaign against sati linked to women’s support for missionary activity in India and to the first coordinated attempt to provide Christian education for Indian girls and women.