Rammohun Roy and the Making of Victorian Britain [Hardcover]

This book investigates Rammohun Roy as a transnational celebrity. It examines the role of religious heterodoxy - particularly Christian Unitarianism - in transforming a colonial outsider into an imagined member of the emerging Victorian social order? It uses his fame to shed fresh light on nineteenth-century British reformers, including advocates of liberty of the press, early feminists, free trade imperialists, and constitutional reformers such as Jeremy Bentham.? Rammohun Roy's intellectual agendas are also interrogated, particularly how he employed Unitarianism and the British satiric tradition to undermine colonial rule in Bengal and provincialize England as a laggard nation in the progress towards rational religion and political liberty.Introduction:?The Celebrated Rammohun Roy The Unitarians Rammohun Roy, Thomas Jefferson, and the Bible Rammohun Roy, Celebrity Unitarian Slavery and Sati Rammohun Roy and Early Victorian Feminism Liberty of the Press Free Trade and a Reformed Parliament Provincializing England Rammohun Roy, MP? Epilogue: A Fitting Statue on College Green

Lynn Zastoupil s work constitutes a pioneering effort in the discovery of Rammohun s engagement with European-Christian public culture. It provides a most comprehensive and empirically detailed history of the encounter between Rammohun and the European public sphere (and most specifically with British social history). This book will remain an indispensable resource for scholars in the coming years. - H-Net

The transnational lineaments of early nineteenth-century radical thought in Britain and elsewhere are traced in this learned and illuminating book. Zastoupil has made an important contribution to our understanding of the world that Rammohun Roy and his allies sought to change. - Dane Kennedy, Elmer Louis Kayser Professor of History and International Affairs, George Washington University

Skillfully weaving the ideas and international celebrity oflãe