Burton Stein

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Burton Stein (1926 – April 26, 1996) was an American historian, whose area of specialization was India.

Life and career

Stein was born and grew up in

University of Illinois. Stein was an unusual case in that he never completed a bachelor's degree. He was admitted directly into a Master of Arts program at the University of Chicago, finishing his masters in 1954 under the supervision of Robert Crane. He wrote his Ph.D. dissertation in 1957 on the economic functions of South India's medieval Tirupati temple
.

Upon the completion of his PhD, Stein was appointed to a teaching post at the

School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London
.

Stein was known for his wide-ranging participation in seminars and other South Asian scholarly work. He continued to write prolifically in his retirement and continued to spend significant amounts of time consulting with students and other scholars. He was known for his dry sense of humour and usually responded to student questioning by posing counterquestions.

Research

Stein's contributions as a research scholar was mainly focused on premodern and colonial South India. He spent the early 1960s formulating a hypothesis about the nature of "state" in South India. He was skeptical of the existence of a system of bureaucracy in the

tribal society and referred to the work of Aidan Southall, "The Illusion of Tribe".[1] He published his first book, Peasant, State and Society in Medieval South India (1980) with the theme of segmentary lineage
.

In retirement, Burt's writing productivity increased over time, with four more books written and a fifth, A History of India, published posthumously in 1998, after being left largely complete. A second, slightly revised, edition was published in 2010, with a chapter added to bring the narrative further forward.[2]

Stein and Jan Broek, a colleague from Minnesota, first devised the idea of a historical atlas of South Asia, and enlisted the backing of Charles Leslie Ames to establish a fellowship in historical cartography of the

Historical Atlas of South Asia
, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1978.

Works

Books
  • 1980: Peasant state and society in medieval South India.
    ISBN 9780195635072
    .
  • 1989: Thomas Munro: The origins of the colonial state and his vision of empire. Oxford University Press. 1989.
    ISBN 9780195623314
    .
  • 1989: Vijayanagara.
    ISBN 978-0-521-26693-2
    .
  • 1998: A History of India. Wiley. 16 June 1998.
    ISBN 978-1-4443-2351-1
Selected articles

References

  1. John Wiley & Sons via Google Books
  2. ISBN 978-1-4443-2351-1
    .

Further reading
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