Tony Ballantyne
My research has focused on three issues. Firstly, I have examined the interconnections between South Asian and British history. This work explored the transformation of Sikhism as well as examining the intellectual and cultural networks that reshaped South Asia in the long nineteenth century, incorporating the region into a larger imperial system of exchange and mobility. These ‘webs of empire’ were reconstructed in my Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British empire (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2001) and also formed the basis of my Between Colonialism and Diaspora: Sikh Cultural Formations in an Imperial World (Duke University Press, 2006). Secondly, I have also published extensively on both the possibilities offered by trans-national history as well as on the need to fashion more culturally-inflected approaches to world history (see, in particular, Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial encounters in World History (Duke) and Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire (Illinois), both of which I co-edited with Antoinette Burton). Thirdly, I have also worked on nineteenth century New Zealand cultural and intellectual history. I am currently completing a manuscript on cross-cultural engagements in early New Zealand entitled Making the Body Colonial. I also have been the Principal Investigator of a research project on knowledge and the colonisation of Murihiku (the far south of NZ's South Island), which has been supported by the Royal Society of NZ's Marsden Fund. The aim of this undertaking has been to examine the impact of colonization on indigenous knowledge traditions and also chart the changing shape of colonial intellectual life between 1848 and 1900.
As that project comes to an end, I am in the early stages of two new projects. One is an examination of the place of information and intelligence in the crises that rocked the British empire in the middle of the nineteenth century and the other is a broad synthetic history of British imperial knowledge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
As that project comes to an end, I am in the early stages of two new projects. One is an examination of the place of information and intelligence in the crises that rocked the British empire in the middle of the nineteenth century and the other is a broad synthetic history of British imperial knowledge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
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