"Peter van der Veer's bracing, audacious book is sure to stir up much-needed debate. Challenging the canonical narratives that have governed analysis of colonialism, culture, and religion, he advances a bold thesis about their complicity across boundaries and nationalist categories. Deeply learned and elegantly presented, Imperial Encounters is a gripping work of the scholarly imagination."—Edward W. Said, Columbia University "This ... Read moreis a splendid book. Peter van der Veer has drawn on a wide range of fascinating readings to elaborate the post-colonial thesis that the modern histories of Britain and India have been mutually constitutive. I believe he is absolutely right in insisting on the fact—and demonstrating it so ably—that modern ideas like nation, religion, and race must be understood, if they are to be understood fully, through an interactional approach. Anyone interested in recent thinking about the joint history of colonialism and modernity should not miss this work."—Talal Asad, City University of New York "Peter van der Veer has made extremely important contributions to the study of Indian history and society. In recent years, he has taken a particularly important approach, one the puts him at the cutting edge of historical work, in placing the European metropole and the Asian colonized into the same historical space. In this volume, he explores one aspect of the subject in depth and provides a coherent single-voice narrative. The scholarship is of the highest level, and van der Veer writes very well, often with a clever nuance or twist."—Barbara Metcalf, University of California, Davis Show Less