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Description of  Music and Empire in Britain and India: Identity, Internationalism, and Cross-Cultural Communication

Partly because of academic disciplinary boundaries, music remains a neglected subject in British Imperial history and, indeed, intellectual history at large. Nonetheless, the imperial encounter was, as this richly detailed new study demonstrates, a sound exercise, and music was a key dimension of identity formation as well as transnational networks and transcultural communication between colonizer and colonized. Specifically, it explores the ways in which rational, moral, and aesthetic motives underlying the institutionalization and modernization of 'classical' music converged and diverged in Britain and India out of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. In addition, it tracks subversive, internationalist counter-movements that challenged nationalist musical establishments - as well as the openness of some Britons and Indians to the possibility of learning from each other. Ranging from the groundbreaking folk music research and compositions of Percy Grainger to Sikh sacred music, this study opens up new areas for research by applying music as a lens through which to examine societal and intellectual change.