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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
Chicago, Illinois (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...
and served in the Second World War, before commencing tertiary study at the now disused Navy Pier facility that in 1945 was the Chicago campus of the
University of Illinois The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Universi ...
. 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 Sri Venkateswara Swami Vaari Temple is a Hindu temple situated in the hill town of Tirumala at Tirupati in Tirupati district of Andhra Pradesh, India. The Temple is dedicated to Venkateswara, a form of Vishnu, who is believed to have appeared ...
. Upon the completion of his PhD, Stein was appointed to a teaching post at the University of Minnesota, where he stayed until the end of 1965. He then married the author Dorothy Stein and moved to the University of Hawaii where he stayed for 17 years until 1983. He held visiting professorships at the University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania,
University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seattle ...
, University of California, Berkeley and the Centre for Historical Studies of
Jawaharlal Nehru University Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) is a public major research university located in New Delhi, India. It was established in 1969 and named after Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister. The university is known for leading faculties an ...
. He moved to London serving as a Professorial Research Associate of 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
Chola Dynasty The Chola dynasty was a Tamil thalassocratic empire of southern India and one of the longest-ruling dynasties in the history of the world. The earliest datable references to the Chola are from inscriptions dated to the 3rd century BCE d ...
. He delved into the theory of
tribal society The term tribe is used in many different contexts to refer to a category of human social group. The predominant worldwide usage of the term in English is in the discipline of anthropology. This definition is contested, in part due to conflic ...
and referred to the work of Aidan Southall, "The Illusion of Tribe". He published his first book, ''Peasant, State and Society in Medieval South India'' (1980) with the theme of
segmentary lineage A segmentary lineage society has equivalent parts ("segments") held together by shared values. A segmentary lineage society is a type of tribal society. A close family is usually the smallest and closest segment and will generally stand togethe ...
. 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. 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 Indian subcontinent. Under the leadership of Joseph E. Schwartzberg, the work on the atlas began in the mid-1960s. Stein was an active advisor on the project, which resulted in the publications of ''A
Historical Atlas of South Asia ''A Historical Atlas of South Asia'' is a definitive historical chronology of the region of South Asia from prehistoric times through the present. It was edited and largely authored by Joseph E. Schwartzberg, professor emeritus of South Asian Stud ...
'', published by the University of Chicago Press in 1978.


Works

; Books * 1980: * 1989: * 1989: * 1998: ; 2010: Second edition revised by David Arnold, ; Selected articles * 1985: * 1985:


References


Further reading

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Stein, Burton 1996 deaths 1926 births Writers from Chicago American Indologists University of Hawaiʻi faculty Academics of SOAS University of London University of Illinois Chicago alumni University of Chicago alumni University of Minnesota alumni American historians