Challenging the grammar of difference: Benoy Kumar Sarkar,global mobility and anti-imperialism around the First World War

The new imperial history has advanced our understanding of empires in many ways: it enhanced a networked interpretation of empires, brought space back into the discussion, and suggested a fresh reading of imperial careers to comprehend early forms of global inter-dependencies. This article discusses selected aspects of the life and work of Benoy Kumar Sarkar (1887–1949), a Bengali social scientist and political activist, to illustrate that anti-imperial biographies were simultaneously rooted in local as well as transnational spaces. They thus connected national struggles with globe-spanning processes. Biographies like this are underacknowledged in their meaning for how empires functioned and failed, and in their potential for understanding transnational actors. Sarkar’s efforts to challenge the legitimacy of the British Empire were the result of his life in a transnational social field, which was equally shaped by his extensive experience abroad and his continuous rootedness in local Bengali affairs. Sarkar’s anti-imperialism was enhanced by the mobility structures of the British Empire and resulted in new constellations of imperial, cosmopolitan, local and regional orientations and attachments. In this view, anti-imperialism was less the result of local struggles but of life practices reaching beyond the borders of the empire and a high awareness of acting in a global context that located its protagonists in numerous social and spatial contexts.     

Sôtélès l'Athénien

A second Greek-inscribed sherd mentioning Soteles the Athenian was discovered in stratified context during the excavations at Failaka (ancient Ikaros), Kuwait. It gives a short list of three Greek personal names, Soteles, Dionysios and Agatharchos. It also provides a secure date for the activity of this Seleucid officer in the first half of the third century BC. The other sherd pertaining to Soteles is re-examined. Both were parts of inscribed vases offered to the deities of the temples inside and outside the fortress, during the process of settlement of the first Greek garrison.