Mountstuart Elphinstone in South Asia

Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779-1859), Lowland Scottish traveller, East India Company civil servant and educator, was one of the principal intellectual architects of British colonial rule in South Asia. Imbued with liberal views, such that Bombay's wealthy founded Elphinstone College in his memory, he pioneered the scholarly, scientific and administrative foundations of imperialism in India. Elphinstone's career was launched when he was picked to lead the inaugural British diplomatic mission to the Afghan court. His Account of the Kingdom of Caubul (1815) became the main source of British information about Afghanistan. He is best known for his periods as Resident at Poona and Governor of Bombay in the 1810s and 1820s, when he instituted innovative and lasting policies in administration and education while also conducting research for his extremely influential History of India (1841). This volume examines Mountstuart Elphinstone's intellectual contributions and administrative career in their own right, in relation to prominent contemporaries including Charles Metcalfe and William Moorcroft, and in the context of later historical study of India, Afghanistan, British imperialism and its imperial frontiers.

Shah Mahmoud Hanifi is Professor of History at James Madison University, Virginia. William Dalrymple is a writer and historian, whose books include The Last Mughal; White Mughals; and Return of a King: The Battle of Afghanistan.

Dedication Acknowledgements Preface by William Dalrymple Introduction Part I: Mountstuart Elphinstone and An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul
1. Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, A Book History of Mountstuart Elphinstone's An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul
2. M. Jamil Hanifi, Mountstuart Elphinstone: An Anthropologist Before Anthropology
3. Jonathan Lee, The Elphinstone Mission, the 'Kingdom of Caubul' and Turkic world
4. Zak Leonard, Muslim "Fanaticism" as Ambiguous Trope: A Study in Polemical Mutation
Part II: Mountstuart Elphinstone and His Contemporaries
5. Senzil Nawid, The Discovery of Afghanistan in the Era of Imperialism: George Forster, Mountstuart Elphinstone, and Charles Masson
6. Brian Spooner, Lieutenant Henry Pottinger and 150 Years of Baloch History
7. Robert Nichols, Information and affect in Charles Metcalfe's mission to Lahore, August 1808-May 1809
8. Lynn Zastoupil, Mountstuart Elphinstone and Indian Education
9. Spencer Leonard, Can Imperialists Produce Knowledge? The Case of James Grant Duff's History of the Mahrattas
Part III: Mountstuart Elphinstone: Comparisons and Legacy
10. Kyle Gardner Elphinstone, Geography, and the Specter of Afghanistan in the Himalaya
11. Tom Simpson, Forgetting Like a State in Colonial North-East India
12. Martin Bayly, Mountstuart Elphinstone, Colonial Knowledge and 'Frontier Governmentality' in Northwest India, 1849-1878
13. Timothy Nunan, The Soviet Elphinstone: Colonial Histories, Post-Colonial Presents, and Socialist Futures in the Soviet Reception of British Orientalism
14. Elisabeth Leake, Elphinstone and the Afghan-Pathan Elision: Comparative British and American Approaches in the Twentieth Century