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A Rejoinder to Tirthankar Roy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 June 2015

SHAMI GHOSH
SHAMI GHOSH*
Affiliation:
Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, Canada Email: [email protected]
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Extract

I am grateful to Tirthankar Roy for his prompt response, and his generosity in acknowledging the validity of some of my criticisms. It will be obvious to readers that there are some fundamental disagreements between us regarding what constitutes economic history. On this, and a number of other issues that Professor Roy has chosen not to address, it would be tedious to repeat myself; we must agree to disagree and invite readers of this journal to draw for themselves the conclusions they wish—and, ultimately, how fair I have been in assessing his book is something that readers will only be able to judge by reading it themselves. I focus below on the three core issues with which most of his response is concerned: ‘reading the past with reference to the present’, the importance of a ‘region-focused approach’, and the ‘comparative approach’.

Type
Review Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 49 , Issue 5 , September 2015 , pp. 1667 - 1673
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

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4 Perhaps I am overly enthusiastic about these and other works of South Asian history that adopt regional and local perspectives, but it seems to me that Professor Roy is excessively dismissive in his view of such works, many of which have a more sophisticated approach to region-focused history than might be apparent from his comments; indeed, his view that ‘by and large the archival research done on the eighteenth century does not ask economic history questions’ seems a bit harsh.

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