Anne L. Murphy

The eighteenth-century Bank of England was an institution that operated for the benefit of its shareholders—and yet came to be considered, as Adam Smith described it, “a great engine of state.” In Virtuous Bankers, Anne Murphy explores how this private organization became the guardian of the public credit upon which Britain’s economic and geopolitical power was based. Drawing on the voluminous and detailed minute books of a Committee of Inspection that examined the Bank’s workings in 1783–84, Murphy frames her account as “a day in the life” of the Bank of England, looking at a day’s worth of banking activities that ranged from the issuing of bank notes to the management of public funds.

Murphy discusses the bank as a domestic environment, a working environment, and a space to be protected against theft, fire, and revolt. She offers new insights into the skills of the Bank’s clerks and the ways in which their work was organized, and she positions the Bank as part of the physical and cultural landscape of the City: an aggressive property developer, a vulnerable institution seeking to secure its buildings, and an enterprise necessarily accessible to the public. She considers the aesthetics of its headquarters—one of London’s finest buildings—and the messages of creditworthiness embedded in that architecture and in the very visible actions of the Bank’s clerks. Murphy’s uniquely intimate account shows how the eighteenth-century Bank was able to deliver a set of services that were essential to the state and commanded the confidence of the public.

A Day in the Life of the Eighteenth-Century Bank of England

Virtuous Bankers

Anshu Malhotra

This volume brings together works by established and emerging scholars to consider the work and impact of Bhai Vir Singh. Bhai Vir Singh (1872-1957) was a major force in the shaping of modern Sikh and Punjabi culture, language, and politics in the undivided colonial Punjab, prior to the Partition of the province in 1947, and in the post-colonial state of India. The chapters in this book explore how he both reflected and shaped his time and context and address some of the ongoing legacy of his work in the lives of contemporary Sikhs. The contributors analyze the varied genres, literary, and historical that were adopted and adapted by Bhai Vir Singh to foreground and enhance Sikh religiosity and identity. These include his novels, didactic pamphlets, journalistic writing, prefatory and exegetical work on spiritual and secular historical documents, and his poems and lyrics, among others. This book will be of particular interest to those working in Sikh studies, South Asian studies, and post-colonial studies.

Religious and Literary Modernities in Colonial and Post-Colonial Indian Punjab

Bhai Vir Singh (1872–1957)

Anne Murphy offers a groundbreaking exploration of material representations of the Sikh past, showing how objects, as well as historical sites, and texts, have played a vital role in the production of the Sikh community as an evolving historical and social formation from the eighteenth century to the present. Drawing together work in religious studies, postcolonial studies, and history, Murphy explores how 'relic' objects such as garments and weaponry have, like sites, played dramatically different roles across political and social contexts-signifiers of authority and even sovereignty in one; collected, revered, and displayed with religious significance in another-and are connected to a broader engagement with the representation of the past that is central to the formation of the Sikh community. By highlighting the connections between relic objects and historical sites, and how the status of sites changed in the colonial period, she also provides crucial insight into the circumstances that brought about the birth of a new territorial imagination of the Sikh past in the early twentieth century, rooted in existing precolonial historical imaginaries centered in place and object. The life of the object today and in the past, she suggests, provides unique insight into the formation of the Sikh community and the crucial role representations play in it.

History and Representation in Sikh Tradition

The Materiality of the Past

Religious imaginary is a way of conceiving and structuring the world within the conceptual and imaginative traditions of the religious. Using religious imaginary as a reference, this book analyses temporal ideologies and expressions of historicity in South Asia in the early modern, pre-colonial and early colonial period. Chapters explore the multiple understandings of time and the past that informed the historical imagination in various kinds of literary representations, including historiographical and literary texts, hagiography, and religious canonical literature. The book addresses the contributing forces and comparative implications of the formation of religious and communitarian sensibilities as expressed through the imagination of the past, and suggests how these relate to each other within and across traditions in South Asia. By bringing diverse materials together, this book presents new commonalities and distinctions that inform a larger understanding of how religion and other cultural formations impinge on the concept of temporality, and the representation of it as history.

Time, History and the Religious Imaginary in South Asia

Churnjeet Mahn

This edited collection attends to the locations of memory along and about the Indo-Pakistan and Indo-Bangladesh borders and the complex ways in which such memories are both allowed for and erased in the present. The collection is situated at the intersection of narratives connected to memory and commemoration in order to ask how memories have been formed and perpetuated across the imposition of these borders. It explores how national boundaries both silence memories and can be subverted in important ways, through consideration of physical sites and cultural practices on both sides of the India-Pakistan-Bangladesh borders that gesture towards that which has been lost – that is, the cultural whole that was the cultural regions of Punjab and Bengal before Partition, as well as broader cultural "wholes" across South Asia, across religious and linguistic lines – alongside forces that deny such connections. The chapters address issues of heritage and memory through specific case-studies on present-day memorial, museological and commemoration practices, through which sometimes competing memorial landscapes have been constructed, and show how memories of past traumas and histories become inscribed into diverse forms of cultural heritage (the built landscape, literature, film).

Anne L. Murphy

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