Barbara N. Ramusack – Författare

"These four volumes in this major series . . . provide a single-source reference to the status of the field of women's history and to ways that the field can be expanded. . . . A basic set for all academic libraries." —Library Journal Academic NewswireWriting on South and Southeast Asia, Ramusack surveys both the prescriptive roles and lived experiences of women, as well as the construction of gender from the period of the early states to the 1990s. Sievers presents an overview of women's participation in the histories of China, Japan, and Korea from prehistory to the modern period.

Although the princes of India have been caricatured as oriental despots and British stooges, Barbara Ramusack's study argues that the British did not create the princes. On the contrary, many were consummate politicians who exercised considerable degrees of autonomy until the disintegration of the princely states after independence. Ramusack's synthesis has a broad temporal span, tracing the evolution of the Indian kings from their pre-colonial origins to their roles as clients in the British colonial system. The book breaks ground in its integration of political and economic developments in the major princely states with the shifting relationships between the princes and the British. It represents a major contribution, both to British imperial history in its analysis of the theory and practice of indirect rule, and to modern South Asian history, as a portrait of the princes as politicians and patrons of the arts.