Moritz Deutschmann 
Edward Said and the Cultural History of British Colonialism in India [PDF ebook] 

Essay from the year 2009 in the subject History — Basics, European University Institute (Department of History, Florenz), language: English, abstract: This text discusses the role of culture in the history of European colonialism. It takes Said’s notion of ‘Orientalism’ as a starting point. It then discusses two very different books that have tried to make Said’s notion useful for the study of concrete colonial situations: Christopher Bayly’s ‘Empire and Information’, and Nicholas Dirks’ ‘Castes of Mind’. Whereas Bayly’s concept of an ‘information order’ tries to undermine ideas about a European hegemony of knowledge, Dirks stresses the far-reaching influence European concepts had even on post-colonial notions of caste in India.