Acknowledgements

In the course of writing this book, I have benefited from the assistance of many people. I would like first of all to express my thanks to the American Institute of Indian Studies and the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars who funded my work in Madras. I was aided in my work by the staffs of the Tamil Nad State Archives, the Madras Oriental Manuscripts Library, the India Office Library and Records, the National Library of Scotland, the Archives d’Outre Mer, and the Frankesche Stiftungen.

Many people have provided me with materials and have helped me with translations of difficult material. I would like particularly to thank Mrs. Kausalya Hart for her time in working on translations and to Dr. Emmanuel Divien for helping me get photocopies of valuable materials.

Many colleagues and students have read all or part of the manuscript, sometimes in multiple versions. Others have listened to presentations of the materials that have formed the basis of this book. I gave an account of the Conclusion at the annual meeting of the Association of Asian Studies in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1992 and derived much advantage from comments on that and other presentations. I would like to thank Stuart Blackburn, Katharine Flemming, Thomas Brady, David Hollinger, Martin Jay, Thomas Metcalf, James Gregory, Douglas Haynes, Stephen Dale, Susan Neild Basu, William Meehan, David Kuchta, Jeffery Ravel, Dane Kennedy, Nasser Hussain, Sumathi Ramaswami, Michael Katten, Natalie Pickering, Aloka Parasher Sen, and Jeanne-Marie Stumpf-Carome for their comments and ideas. My students in my seminars over the last decade have commented on my notions and I am most grateful to them: they and my colleagues have helped to make me what I am. Both Anand Yang and Mattison Mines wrote long and detailed criticisms of the manuscript that enabled me to enhance the force of the argument in many ways. I am grateful to two organizations who helped germinate the ideas that appear in this book, the French History Group and the WIRTH group. In both cases, members of these groups have provided me useful perspectives. David Gilmartin read the manuscript two times and enabled me to make the argument more precise. Ines Županov read the manuscript in three different versions. At the time, she was herself writing her dissertation and I profited enormously from her insights. Sandria Freitag helped me to clarify further the argument and develop an intelligible text. I would also like to thank Cherie Semens, who drew the maps, and Lynne Withey, who assisted me through the process of publication.