India has been noticeably absent in current literature about Edinburgh, yet the city’s historical relationship with South Asia has been long and deep. In this book, a companion to India in Edinburgh, the significance of this relationship is made clear through careful selections of writings by people linked to Edinburgh, and of Indians who have been influenced by their time in the city. Through lively extracts Perceptions of Empire: Edinburgh’s Engagement with India introduces readers to men and women, ardent imperialists and critics of the British Empire, Indian students at the University of Edinburgh alongside missionaries and tourists. The editors provide context for these extracts and show how an early appreciation of India’s civilisations in the eighteenth century gave way to hostility and arrogance in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Later writings, however, point towards more respect and equality. Perceptions of Empire will appeal to anyone with an interest in imperial and post-colonial history, decolonisation, cultural and intellectual history, and the social life of cities.
About the Editors:
Roger Jeffery is Emeritus Professor of Sociology of South Asia at the University of Edinburgh, where he worked from 1972 to 2024. He has written widely on north Indian society, based on intensive fieldwork in villages north-east of Delhi, as well as on health policy in South Asia. His edited collections include volumes on social forestry, women’s education and fertility, contemporary Uttar Pradesh, and the marginalisation of ethnic and religious minorities in India. He co-founded Edinburgh University’s Centre for South Asian Studies in 1987 and is Associate Director of its Edinburgh India Institute, which he founded in 2012. Since 2015, he has been researching the ‘footprint’ of India in Edinburgh. He edited India in Edinburgh, 1750s to the Present (New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2019 and Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2020). Friederike Voigt is Principal Curator of the West, South and Southeast Asian collections at National Museums Scotland in Edinburgh, which she joined in 2008. She is fascinated by how museum collections encapsulate human thinking and concepts. Her research investigates the perspectives of individuals involved in the British Empire in India in relation to the objects they contributed to these collections. Her scholarship has informed special exhibitions, permanent galleries and partnership work with South Asian communities. Believing that museums play critical roles in the shaping of society, she uses her curatorial expertise to diversify the voices represented in them. Currently, she leads on a multidisciplinary study of historical paintings from eighteenth-century Murshidabad, Bengal. The project sheds new light on interactions between local artisans and European customers and involves collaborations with communities in India and Scotland.