JOIN IN THE GLOBAL BOOK CRAWL MORE INFO
Nicholas Abbott is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. His research focuses on gender, politics, and state formation in Mughal and colonial India and has been published in the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Itinerario and Modern Asian Studies.
Nicholas Abbott is breaking new ground in writing about South Asia's eighteenth century from predominantly Persian source materials. This monograph offers a fresh approach to early colonial history as well as an exhaustive and imaginative treatment of source material. Abbott is particularly innovative in using philological and semiotic tools to think about the evolving concept of ""sarkar"" and in his capacious and thoughtful treatment of gender; by foregrounding the role of Awadh's matriarchs, he presents a gender-sensitive reading of state and colonialism at a time of profound transition.--Samira Sheikh, Vanderbilt University An erudite, thorough and thoughtful break with androcentric colonial-postcolonial historiography of 'the native state'. Abbott's book also pioneers as the first monograph on women in propertied households as pivots of early modern South Asian finance and political culture. It considerably deepens modern feminist debates on Indian women's political and property rights--Indrani Chatterjee, University of Virginia
