Download or read book The Chaos of Empire written by Jon Wilson and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2016-10-25 with total page 586 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The popular image of the British Raj-an era of efficient but officious governors, sycophantic local functionaries, doting amahs, blisteringly hot days and torrid nights-chronicled by Forster and Kipling is a glamorous, nostalgic, but entirely fictitious. In this dramatic revisionist history, Jon Wilson upends the carefully sanitized image of unity, order, and success to reveal an empire rooted far more in violence than in virtue, far more in chaos than in control. Through the lives of administrators, soldiers, and subjects-both British and Indian-The Chaos of Empire traces Britain's imperial rule from the East India Company's first transactions in the 1600s to Indian Independence in 1947. The Raj was the most public demonstration of a state's ability to project power far from home, and its perceived success was used to justify interventions around the world in the years that followed. But the Raj's institutions-from law courts to railway lines-were designed to protect British power without benefiting the people they ruled. This self-serving and careless governance resulted in an impoverished people and a stifled society, not a glorious Indian empire. Jon Wilson's new portrait of a much-mythologized era finally and convincingly proves that the story of benign British triumph was a carefully concocted fiction, here thoroughly and totally debunked.

Download or read book The British Conquest and Dominion of India written by Penderel Moon and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 794 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Inglorious Empire written by Shashi Tharoor and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 2018-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inglorious Empire' tells the real story of the British in India from the arrival of the East India Company to the end of the Raj, revealing how Britain's rise was built upon its plunder of India. In the eighteenth century, India's share of the world economy was as large as Europe's. By 1947, after two centuries of British rule, it had decreased six-fold. Beyond conquest and deception, the Empire blew rebels from cannon, massacred unarmed protesters, entrenched institutionalised racism, and caused millions to die from starvation. British imperialism justified itself as enlightened despotism for the benefit of the governed, but Shashi Tharoor takes on and demolishes this position, demonstrating how every supposed imperial "gift" - from the railways to the rule of law -was designed in Britain's interests alone. He goes on to show how Britain's Industrial Revolution was founded on India's deindustrialisation, and the destruction of its textile industry.

Download or read book History of the British conquests in India written by Horace St. John and published by . This book was released on 1852 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book India on the Eve of the British Conquest written by Sidney James Owen and published by . This book was released on 1872 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The British in India written by David Gilmour and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2018-11-13 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An immersive portrait of the lives of the British in India, from the seventeenth century to Independence Who of the British went to India, and why? We know about Kipling and Forster, Orwell and Scott, but what of the youthful forestry official, the enterprising boxwallah, the fervid missionary? What motivated them to travel halfway around the globe, what lives did they lead when they got there, and what did they think about it all? Full of spirited, illuminating anecdotes drawn from long-forgotten memoirs, correspondence, and government documents, The British in India weaves a rich tapestry of the everyday experiences of the Britons who found themselves in “the jewel in the crown” of the British Empire. David Gilmour captures the substance and texture of their work, home, and social lives, and illustrates how these transformed across the several centuries of British presence and rule in the subcontinent, from the East India Company’s first trading station in 1615 to the twilight of the Raj and Partition and Independence in 1947. He takes us through remote hill stations, bustling coastal ports, opulent palaces, regimented cantonments, and dense jungles, revealing the country as seen through British eyes, and wittily reveling in all the particular concerns and contradictions that were a consequence of that limited perspective. The British in India is a breathtaking accomplishment, a vivid and balanced history written with brio, elegance, and erudition.

Download or read book The British Conquest and Dominion of India written by Penderel Moon and published by India Research Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 1266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For some years before his death the veteran India hand Sir Penderel Moon was engaged in what was to be the culmination of his lifes work: a large-scale history of the two centuries of British involvement in India â from the battle of Plassey to the final independence of India and Pakistan some forty years ago. It is a masterly account of men and events. Part One describes the conquests of the East India Company in the wake of the disintegrating Moghul empire, and the gradual development of an administrative system. A major theme is the haphazard nature of the growth of British rule and the general ineffectiveness of the home authorities. Another is the conflict of attitudes between those who wish to replace Indian with English ways and those concerned to preserve what was best in Indias ancient civilization. The watershed was the disastrous Mutiny of 1857. Part Two describes the eighty-nine years during which India was ruled directly from Whitehall and the growing demand by Indians for self-government (fed by literal ideas from the British themselves). The more far-sighted has long recognized this as inevitable, though few if any had foreseen that the end of British rule would mean the loss of Indian unity. --

Download or read book History of the British Conquests in India written by Horace Stebbing R. St. John and published by . This book was released on 1852 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The History of the British Empire in India written by George Robert Gleig and published by . This book was released on 1830 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Mapping an Empire written by Matthew H. Edney and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-02-15 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fascinating history of the British surveys of India, Matthew H. Edney relates how imperial Britain used modern survey techniques to not only create and define the spatial image of its Empire, but also to legitimate its colonialist activities. "There is much to be praised in this book. It is an excellent history of how India came to be painted red in the nineteenth century. But more importantly, Mapping an Empire sets a new standard for books that examine a fundamental problem in the history of European imperialism."—D. Graham Burnett, Times Literary Supplement "Mapping an Empire is undoubtedly a major contribution to the rapidly growing literature on science and empire, and a work which deserves to stimulate a great deal of fresh thinking and informed research."—David Arnold, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History "This case study offers broadly applicable insights into the relationship between ideology, technology and politics. . . . Carefully read, this is a tale of irony about wishful thinking and the limits of knowledge."—Publishers Weekly

Download or read book Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth Century India written by Robert Travers and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-04-19 with total page 16 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Travers' analysis of British conquests in late eighteenth-century India shows how new ideas were formulated about the construction of empire. After the British East India Company conquered the vast province of Bengal, Britons confronted the apparent anomaly of a European trading company acting as an Indian ruler. Responding to a prolonged crisis of imperial legitimacy, British officials in Bengal tried to build their authority on the basis of an 'ancient constitution', supposedly discovered among the remnants of the declining Mughal Empire. In the search for an indigenous constitution, British political concepts were redeployed and redefined on the Indian frontier of empire, while stereotypes about 'oriental despotism' were challenged by the encounter with sophisticated Indian state forms. This highly original book uncovers a forgotten style of imperial state-building based on constitutional restoration, and in the process opens up new points of connection between British, imperial and South Asian history.

Download or read book India and the British Empire written by Douglas M. Peers and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-09 with total page 518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: South Asian History has enjoyed a remarkable renaissance over the past thirty years. Its historians are not only producing new ways of thinking about the imperial impact and legacy on South Asia, but also helping to reshape the study of imperial history in general. The essays in this collection address a number of these important developments, delineating not only the complicated interplay between imperial rulers and their subjects in India, but also illuminating the economic, political, environmental, social, cultural, ideological, and intellectual contexts which informed, and were in turn informed by, these interactions. Particular attention is paid to a cluster of binary oppositions that have hitherto framed South Asian history, namely colonizer/colonized, imperialism/nationalism, and modernity/tradition, and how new analytical frameworks are emerging which enable us to think beyond the constraints imposed by these binaries. Closer attention to regional dynamics as well as to wider global forces has enriched our understanding of the history of South Asia within a wider imperial matrix. Previous impressions of all-powerful imperialism, with the capacity to reshape all before it, for good or ill, are rejected in favour of a much more nuanced image of imperialism in India that acknowledges the impact as well as the intentions of colonialism, but within a much more complicated historical landscape where other processes are at work.

Download or read book The History of British India written by James Mill and published by . This book was released on 1848 with total page 636 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Masks of Conquest written by Gauri Viswanathan and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-12-16 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A classic work in postcolonial studies, Masks of Conquest describes the introduction of English studies in India under British rule and illuminates the discipline's transcontinental movements and derivations, showing that the origins of English studies are as diverse and diffuse as its future shape. In her new preface, Gauri Viswanathan argues forcefully that the curricular study of English can no longer be understood innocently of or inattentively to the imperial contexts in which the discipline first articulated its mission.

Download or read book Problems of Empire written by P. J. Marshall and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-03-14 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, first published in 1968, is a study of the impact made on Britain by the conquest of large parts of India in the second half of the eighteenth century. The sudden success of the East India Company in subjugating a vast population with a sophisticated civilization created problems of an unprecedented kind for Britain. It raised in an acute form questions about the scope and limits of state action, the rights of chartered bodies, the duties of conquerors to subject peoples, the appropriateness of exporting western ideals and concepts of law and government to Asia, and the manner in which the resources of the East could best contribute to Britain's power and wealth. These and similar topics were discussed at length in Parliament, the press, books and pamphlets, and in the correspondence of private individuals. A selection of this material, drawing on a wide and varied range of printed and manuscript sources, has been made to illustrate the arguments used in this debate and the manner in which solutions to some of the problems were gradually worked out over a period of more than fifty years. By 1813, after much trial and error, the outline of the political, administrative and economic links which were to bind India to Britain for much of the nineteenth century are already visible.

Download or read book The British Raj written by Charles River Charles River Editors and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-01-07 with total page 70 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Includes pictures *Includes contemporary accounts written about the Raj by British and Indians *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading "A significant fact which stands out is that those parts of India which have been longest under British rule are the poorest today. Indeed some kind of chart might be drawn up to indicate the close connection between length of British rule and progressive growth of poverty." - Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India The British East India Company served as one of the key players in the formation of the British Empire. From its origins as a trading company struggling to keep up with its superior Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish competitors to its tenure as the ruling authority of the Indian subcontinent to its eventual hubristic downfall, the East India Company serves as a lens through which to explore the much larger economic and social forces that shaped the formation of a global British Empire. As a private company that became a non-state global power in its own right, the East India Company also serves as a cautionary tale all too relevant to the modern world's current political and economic situation. On its most basic level, the East India Company played an essential part in the development of long-distance trade between Britain and Asia. The trade in textiles, ceramics, tea, and other goods brought a huge influx of capital into the British economy. This not only fueled the Industrial Revolution, but also created a demand for luxury items amongst the middle classes. The economic growth provided by the East India Company was one factor in Britain's ascendancy from a middling regional power to the most powerful nation on the planet. The profits generated by the East India Company also created incentive for other European powers to follow its lead, which led to three centuries of competition for colonies around the world. This process went well beyond Asia to affect most of the planet, including Africa and the Middle East.. Beyond its obvious influence in areas like trade and commerce, the East India Company also served as a point of cultural contact between Western Europeans, South Asians, and East Asians. Quintessentially British practices such as tea drinking were made possible by East India Company trade. The products and cultural practices traveling back and forth on East India Company ships from one continent to another also reconfigured the way societies around the globe viewed sexuality, gender, class, and labor. On a much darker level, the East India Company fueled white supremacy and European concepts of Orientalism. Ultimately, the company's activity across the Indian subcontinent led to further British involvement there, and the British Raj, a period of British dominance and rule over India that formally began in 1857 and lasted until 1947, remains a highly debated topic amongst historians, political scientists, the British people, and the people of modern India. It's necessary to seek an understanding of the people, forces, and events shaping the history of British India to arrive at valid conclusions about the British-Indian experience and to understand the continued divide over its legacy. Perhaps then it's possible to answer Lewis's question: "Is it possible that British rule was both destructive and creative at the same time?" The British Raj: The History and Legacy of Great Britain's Imperialism in India and the Indian Subcontinent looks at the importance of British colonialism in the region, and how it has affected the course of history to this day. Along with pictures and a bibliography, you will learn about the British Raj like never before.

Download or read book An Era of Darkness written by Shashi Tharoor and published by Aleph Book Company. This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A few years later, the young and weakened Mughal emperor, Shah Alam II, was browbeaten into issuing an edict that replaced his own revenue officials with the Company s representatives. Over the next several decades, the East India Company, backed by the British government, extended its control over most of India