Why and how do debates about the form and disposition of our Earth shape enlightened subjectivity and secular worldliness in colonial modernity? Sumathi Ramaswamy explores this question for British India with the aid of the terrestrial globe, which since the sixteenth century has circulated as a worldly symbol, a scientific instrument, and not least an educational tool for inculcating planetary consciousness.
In Terrestrial Lessons, Ramaswamy provides the first in-depth analysis of the globe’s history in and impact on the Indian subcontinent during the colonial era and its aftermath. Drawing on a wide array of archival sources, she delineates its transformation from a thing of distinction possessed by elite men into that mass-produced commodity used in classrooms worldwide—the humble school globe. Traversing the length and breadth of British India, Terrestrial Lessons is an unconventional history of this master object of pedagogical modernity that will fascinate historians of cartography, science, and Asian studies.
Today, acceptance of human-influenced climate change is widely seen as a marker of an educated person, denial as an indication of scientific, geographic, and perhaps political ignorance. In an earlier era, the same could be said for the understanding of Earth as anything other than a sphere. Since at least 1492, the globe that embodies the concept of a spherical Earth has been, in the words of historian Sumathi Ramaswamy, ?a master object of pedagogic modernity, a knowledge of whose shape and contours has been deemed critical to, indeed constitutive of, one’s status as literate and schooled, even enlightened.” In this book, she reconstructs the globe’s history in and impact on the Indian subcontinent during the colonial era (1794 1956). Drawing on a wide array of archival sources, she traces the movement of the globe conceptually from a wondrous and precious artifact whose possession was the prerogative of elite European men to a mass-produced commodity primarily associated with schoolchildren, women, and native peoples.
Lisainfo e-raamatute kohta