Round Table Conference Geographies
Constituting Colonial India in Interwar London

Explores the spaces and events of the interwar Round Table Conference which drafted the blueprint for colonial India's constitutional future.

Stephen Legg (Author)

9781009215312, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 11 May 2023

375 pages
23.6 x 16.2 x 2.8 cm, 0.63 kg

'Legg helps us understand the contentious relationship between empire and democratisation through an underappreciated forum - the conference. With forensic and careful argumentation, Legg provides an intimate political geography of power and representation.' Robbie Shilliam, Johns Hopkins University

Round Table Conference Geographies explores a major international conference in 1930s London which determined India's constitutional future in the British Empire. Pre-dating the decolonising conferences of the 1950s–60s, the Round Table Conference laid the blueprint for India's future federal constitution. Despite this the conference is unanimously read as a failure, for not having comprehensively reconciled the competing demands of liberal and Indian National Congress politicians, of Hindus and Muslims, and of British versus Princely India. This book argues that the conference's three sessions were vital sites of Indian and imperial politics that demand serious attention. It explores the spatial politics of the conference in terms of its imaginary geographies, infrastructures, host city, and how the conference was contested and represented. The book concludes by asking who gained through representing the conference as a failure and explores it, instead, as a teeming political, social and material space.

List of Figures and Tables
Acknowledgements
Note on Conclusions, Spellings and Abbreviations
1. Introduction: Squaring Round Tables
Part I. Geographical Imaginations: 2. Dominion and Dyarchy: The Absent Presences
3. Community: A Nation and a Table Divided
Part II. Conference Infrastructures: 4. The Conference Method: Between Intention and Desire
5. Staffing the Conference: Experts and Subaltern Diplomats
6. The Speech Factory: Palace Materials and Communication Technologies
Part III. The Conference City: 7. A Hospitable City?: Official Socialising
8. Social London: Residing and Dining
9. At Homes: Political Hostessing and Homemaking
Part IV. Representations: 10. Petitions and Protests: The Page and the Street
11. Failure: Ending and Failing
12. Conclusion: Squaring Round Tables
Notes
References
Index.

Subject Areas: Political geography [RGCP], Human geography [RGC], History of ideas [JFCX], Historical geography [HBTP], History: specific events & topics [HBT], History [HB]