Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- List of illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- List of contributors -- Introduction -- A world of commodities -- Reading commodities -- The cultures of commodities -- Notes -- SECTION I: Making and showing -- 1. Mughal Delhi on my lapel: The charmed life of the painted ivory miniature in Delhi, 1827-1880 -- The last Mughal souvenir: Mughal subversion of the colonial image-gift -- From connoisseur to consumer: Mughal miniatures in Anglo-Indian Delhi -- Contextualizing Mughalerie -- Afterlife: The Delhi ivory miniature in the marketplace -- Notes -- 2. Plates and bangles: Early recorded music in India -- Notes -- 3. The Overland Mail: Moving panoramas and the imagining of trade and communication networks -- Notes -- 4. Exhibiting India: Colonial subjects, imperial objects, and the lives of commodities -- Notes -- SECTION II: Place and environment -- 5. The composition and decomposition of commodities: The colonial careers of coal and ivory -- Coal -- Ivory -- Notes -- 6. Profaning water: The sacred and its others -- I -- II -- III -- IV -- V -- Notes -- 7. Settling the land: The village and the threat of capital in the novel in Goa -- Linearity and commodification -- Origin stories and history -- Pre-lapsarian economies -- Naturalizing the settler -- The sea in geological time -- Realism and ethnography -- Notes -- SECTION III: Labour and migration -- 8. (Re)moving bodies: People, ships and other commodities in the coolie trade from Calcutta -- Notes -- 9. Anxiety, affect and authenticity: The commodification of nineteenth-century emigrants' letters -- Becoming print -- Emigrant tokens -- Producing authenticity -- Notes -- 10. Towards a genealogy of the village in the nineteenth-century British colonial world: Mary Russell Mitford and Henry Sumner Maine -- The village tale