SUMIT

Abstract: Drawing on a rich collection of sources, Sumit Guha's 1999 book reconstructs the history of the forest communities in western India to explore questions of tribal identity and the environment. In so doing, he demonstrates how the ideology of indigenous cultures, developed out of the notion of a pure and untouched ethnicity, is in fact rooted in nineteenth-century racial and colonial anthropology. As a challenge to this view, the author traces the processes by which the apparently immutable identities of South Asian populations took shape, and how these populations interacted politically, economically and socially with civilizations outside their immediate vicinity. While such theories have been discussed by scholars of South-East Asia and Africa, this study examines the South Asian case. Sumit Guha's penetrating and controversial critique will make a significant contribution to that literature.

Abstract: Dr. Sumit Gupta and colleagues discuss the need for national cancer strategies for children in low- and middle-income countries and suggest how such strategies could be implemented. Please see later in the article for the Editors' Summary

Abstract: This book reflects a process of inter-disciplinary dialogue between historians, economists and anthropologists, at a time when the discipline of economic history in South Asia has entered something of a crisis. It is a collection of well-researched, in-depth essays, which are at the same time concerned with linking up their specific concerns with larger issues of the institutional trajectory of South Asia. Traditionally, economics has neglected the role played by institutions in linking micro- and macro-levels of economic functioning. Here, authors like A. K. Bagchi, Claude Markovits, G. Balachandran, Barabar Harriss-White, Sumit Guha and David Ludden bring their collective expertise to bear on the issue.

Abstract: In the last issue of Social History of Medicine, Sumit Guha published a critique of the thesis presented in Szreter (1988), which argued that an increasing weight and diversity of social interventions were primarily responsible for the reduction in Britain's mortality achieved from the 1870s. Previoiusly neglected and harmful urban, factory, and eventually even home environments were improved, as both political and social as well as scientific approaches gradually changed, albeit in a locally diversified manner. Guha's critique is shown to be fundamentally misguided because it is premissed on the assumption that the disease ecologies of eighteenth- and of nineteenth-century England were essentially comparable. This ignores important recent research in the historical epidemiology and demography of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. In conclusion, it is suggested that some of the information presented by Guha in fact further supports the plausibility of the interpretation in Szreter (1988), rather than the McKeown thesis.