How did the British come to conquer South Asia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? This title explores how the British organized the process of "islanding," aiming to create a separable unit of colonial governance and trade in keeping with conceptions of ethnology, culture, and geography.

Sujit Sivasundaram is University Lecturer in World and Imperial History since 1500 and fellow of Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge. He is the author of Nature and the Godly Empire: Science and Evangelical Mission in the Pacific, 1795-1850.