This dissertation examines the various responses of south Indians to the local and global transformations of the late eighteenth century, with the goal of opening up a new perspective on how the Indo-Muslim world actually experienced the revolutionary age. Drawing from hitherto untapped and overlooked primary sources written in Arabic, Persian, Tamil, French and English, this dissertation explores the political, ideological and religious shifts that occurred in three major cities of south India: Madras, Pondicherry and Mysore. It examines how the new economic, military and political challenges brought about by the presence of two competing European imperial powers, the British and the French, provoked locals to explore novel political ideas and ideologies, contest imperial authorities, search for new alliances and allegiances, and introduce new reform agendas in order to reorganize themselves and assure their social, political, and religious survival. The dissertation investigates these questions by analyzing the wide range of responses of Muslim rulers, local intellectuals, and social groups to the new regional dramatic shifts, and exploring their connections with the wider global revolutionary currents of the late eighteenth century. Two major global developments with a great impact on the regional transformation during the period are of particular interests to this dissertation. First, the dissertation explores neglected links between south Indian Muslim rulers, particularly Tipu Sultan of Mysore and Muhammad Wālājāh of Arcot, and Muslim revivalists of the Naqshbandi Mujaddidi order. Second, the dissertation seeks to trace the spread, impact and appropriation of French revolutionary language and symbols in Pondicherry, Madras, Mysore and Hyderabad, and explain how they became entangled with the transforming forces already at work on a local level, even as the British acted quickly to suppress them. Overall, the dissertation argues that during the 1780s and 1790s locals developed a new type of revolutionary consciousness principally driven by local circumstances and conditions but also shaped by the wider global revolutionary currents configured around the French Revolution. This revolutionary consciousness, the dissertation suggests, survived after the death of Tipu Sultan and provided a foundation for anti-British political activities and resistance in early nineteenth century.

This thesis problematizes the capitulation tale of the Nahda by showing how Nahdawis in the earlier phase of the Arab Renaissance voiced autonomy, self assurance, and optimism. To strengthen its argument, the dissertation utilizes the example of Rifa’a Al Tahtawi who represented to some degree the wider attitude of Nahda’s 1st generation elites set against the Nahda of the later generation who voiced ambivalence and angst. Other presuppositions the essay challenges pertain to the outdated historical methodologies that are often laden in orientalist, Islamist and postcolonial literature.

This dissertation analyzes the emergence of popular resistance to the material and infrastructural bases of western imperialism in the Eastern Mediterranean. Centering on the troubled quarter-century of French rule in interwar Syria, it examines the paths by which foreign-capitalized infrastructure companies became targets of widespread discontent, critique and boycott. It proposes the concept of “concessionary imperialism” to account for how multinational, joint-stock companies used the contractual rights of their concessions to implant themselves under Ottoman rule, and how they renegotiated and extended these rights under the French Mandate regime. It is argued that despite their thoroughly multinational character, concessionary companies were mobilized in “national” terms by the French imperial state, in its creation of novel state structures and its attempts at creating the conditions for their long-term survival in the country, beyond the formal end of the Mandate. At the same time, they constituted ready-made battlegrounds for contesting power, exploited by networks of urban activists in their strategic mobilizations against imperialism.

The two central case studies examined are the infrastructural networks whose control and operation provoked most controversy during the Mandate: the Hijaz Railway, and the electricity and tramways utility in Damascus, Tramways et Electricité de Damas. I argue that infrastructure became a rallying point precisely because it stood at the nexus of political sovereignty and economic autonomy. Local control over vital infrastructure, whether expressed in “nationalist” terms, or broader regional or transnational terms, became one of the central political objectives for populist opponents of French imperial rule. Contestations such as these exposed the fractures in the Mandate regime: for it was in the points of weakness between state-sponsored imperialism and concessionary imperialism that resistance was most effectively able to occur. While most studies of interwar anti-imperialism have focused on confrontations with state power imagined at the “national” level, this dissertation unearths the largely forgotten struggles over urban space, economic autonomy and territorial sovereignty.

This dissertation is a cultural and global history of the maritime communities of Nordby and Sønderho on Fanø, and Marstal on Ærø, in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This dissertation suggests the possibility of alternative histories of global engagement in the Age of Empires. Although not a history of the nation state of Denmark, it suggests alternatives for thinking about the past of people who live in this region, especially the global labor force of sailors. I argue that, contrary to the stereotype of Jack Tar, sailors from Nordby, Sønderho, and Marstal had strong social ties within their communities. They were married and had children, and their strong social bonds connected them to their home communities, even as they labored far from their homes for years on end. There was a strong gendered component to maritime labor: Sailors and their wives labored separately during long periods of absence. Sailors’ wives were more likely to do traditional male labor, something which many other historians have pointed out. I argue that sailors were also more likely to do work which was traditionally women’s work. The blurring of gender roles in maritime communities was accompanied by a reaffirmation of gender roles in written evidence.

For sailors, the global aspect of their work was central to their identities. Global literacy was central to their memoirs, and it was also important in how other people saw them. They spoke multiple languages, engaged in cross-cultural encounters, and were familiar with religions, customs, climates, animals, plants, port cities, social structures, and foods which were not found in their home communities. This was central to how they constructed their identities. Especially their cross-cultural engagements were marked by the fact that they were working class rather than European elites. I speculate that as sailors crossed cultural boundaries, they may also have come across medical paradigms which were not established in their home communities. In approaching disease and medicine, their global travels may have been influential as well.