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 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 Imperial Encounters written by Peter van der Veer and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Picking up on Edward Said's claim that the historical experience of empire is common to both the colonizer and the colonized, Peter van der Veer takes the case of religion to examine the mutual impact of Britain's colonization of India on Indian and British culture. He shows that national culture in both India and Britain developed in relation to their shared colonial experience and that notions of religion and secularity were crucial in imagining the modern nation in both countries. In the process, van der Veer chronicles how these notions developed in the second half of the nineteenth century in relation to gender, race, language, spirituality, and science. Avoiding the pitfalls of both world systems theory and national historiography, this book problematizes oppositions between modern and traditional, secular and religious, progressive and reactionary. It shows that what often are assumed to be opposites are, in fact, profoundly entangled. In doing so, it upsets the convenient fiction that India is the land of eternal religion, existing outside of history, while Britain is the epitome of modern secularity and an agent of history. Van der Veer also accounts for the continuing role of religion in British culture and the strong part religion has played in the development of Indian civil society. This masterly work of scholarship brings into view the effects of the very close encounter between India and Britain--an intimate encounter that defined the character of both nations.

Download or read book India in Britain written by Susheila Nasta and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-11-16 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moving away from orthodox narratives of the Raj and British presence in India, this book examines the significance of the networks and connections that South Asians established on British soil. Looking at the period 1858-1950, it presents readings of cultural history and points to the urgent need to open up the parameters of this field of study.

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 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Scandal of Empire written by Nicholas B. Dirks and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many have told of the East India Company’s extraordinary excesses in eighteenth-century India, of the plunder that made its directors fabulously wealthy and able to buy British land and titles, but this is only a fraction of the story. When one of these men—Warren Hastings—was put on trial by Edmund Burke, it brought the Company’s exploits to the attention of the public. Through the trial and after, the British government transformed public understanding of the Company’s corrupt actions by creating an image of a vulnerable India that needed British assistance. Intrusive behavior was recast as a civilizing mission. In this fascinating, and devastating, account of the scandal that laid the foundation of the British Empire, Nicholas Dirks explains how this substitution of imperial authority for Company rule helped erase the dirty origins of empire and justify the British presence in India. The Scandal of Empire reveals that the conquests and exploitations of the East India Company were critical to England’s development in the eighteenth century and beyond. We see how mercantile trade was inextricably linked with imperial venture and scandalous excess and how these three things provided the ideological basis for far-flung British expansion. In this powerfully written and trenchant critique, Dirks shows how the empire projected its own scandalous behavior onto India itself. By returning to the moment when the scandal of empire became acceptable we gain a new understanding of the modern culture of the colonizer and the colonized and the manifold implications for Britain, India, and the world.

Download or read book The East India Company at Home 1757 1857 written by Margot Finn and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2018-02-15 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The East India Company at Home, 1757–1857 explores how empire in Asia shaped British country houses, their interiors and the lives of their residents. It includes chapters from researchers based in a wide range of settings such as archives and libraries, museums, heritage organisations, the community of family historians and universities. It moves beyond conventional academic narratives and makes an important contribution to ongoing debates around how empire impacted Britain. The volume focuses on the propertied families of the East India Company at the height of Company rule. From the Battle of Plassey in 1757 to the outbreak of the Indian Uprising in 1857, objects, people and wealth flowed to Britain from Asia. As men in Company service increasingly shifted their activities from trade to military expansion and political administration, a new population of civil servants, army officers, surveyors and surgeons journeyed to India to make their fortunes. These Company men and their families acquired wealth, tastes and identities in India, which travelled home with them to Britain. Their stories, the biographies of their Indian possessions and the narratives of the stately homes in Britain that came to house them, frame our explorations of imperial culture and its British legacies.

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

Download or read book Selling Empire written by Jonathan Eacott and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2016-02-02 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2017 Bentley Book Prize, World History Association Linking four continents over three centuries, Selling Empire demonstrates the centrality of India--both as an idea and a place--to the making of a global British imperial system. In the seventeenth century, Britain was economically, politically, and militarily weaker than India, but Britons increasingly made use of India's strengths to build their own empire in both America and Asia. Early English colonial promoters first envisioned America as a potential India, hoping that the nascent Atlantic colonies could produce Asian raw materials. When this vision failed to materialize, Britain's circulation of Indian manufactured goods--from umbrellas to cottons--to Africa, Europe, and America then established an empire of goods and the supposed good of empire. Eacott recasts the British empire's chronology and geography by situating the development of consumer culture, the American Revolution, and British industrialization in the commercial intersections linking the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. From the seventeenth into the nineteenth century and beyond, the evolving networks, ideas, and fashions that bound India, Britain, and America shaped persisting global structures of economic and cultural interdependence.

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 The British in India written by David Gilmour and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A SUNDAY TIMES, THE TIMES, SPECTATOR, NEW STATESMAN, TLS BOOK OF THE YEAR The British in this book lived in India from shortly after the reign of Elizabeth I until well into the reign of Elizabeth II. Who were they? What drove these men and women to risk their lives on long voyages down the Atlantic and across the Indian Ocean or later via the Suez Canal? And when they got to India, what did they do and how did they live? This book explores the lives of the many different sorts of Briton who went to India: viceroys and offcials, soldiers and missionaries, planters and foresters, merchants, engineers, teachers and doctors. It evokes the three and a half centuries of their ambitions and experiences, together with the lives of their families, recording the diversity of their work and their leisure, and the complexity of their relationships with the peoples of India. It also describes the lives of many who did not fit in with the usual image of the Raj: the tramps and rascals, the men who 'went native', the women who scorned the role of the traditional memsahib. David Gilmour has spent decades researching in archives, studying the papers of many people who have never been written about before, to create a magnificent tapestry of British life in India. It is exceptional work of scholarly recovery portrays individuals with understanding and humour, and makes an original and engaging contribution to a long and important period of British and Indian history.

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 332 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 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 Great Divide written by Henry Vincent Hodson and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1997 with total page 646 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On August 14, 1947, the greatest and most decisive step in the retreat of British imperialism occurred: the new nation of Pakistan was created out of the body of India, and Britain's century-long domination over the Indian sub-continent ended. Fifty years later, the trauma and subsequent chequered history of political development have led author H.V. Hodson to ask: was it inevitable? Now in a special gift edition published for the 50th anniversary of the founding of Pakistan, this authoritative and impartial account places the events surrounding partition in an historical perspective, providing a major contribution to contemporary history.

Download or read book The Business of Empire written by H. V. Bowen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-12-22 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Business of Empire assesses the domestic impact of British imperial expansion by analysing what happened in Britain following the East India Company's acquisition of a vast territorial empire in South Asia. Drawing on a mass of hitherto unused material contained in the company's administrative and financial records, the book offers a reconstruction of the inner workings of the company as it made the remarkable transition from business to empire during the late-eighteenth century. H. V. Bowen profiles the company's stockholders and directors and examines how those in London adapted their methods, working practices, and policies to changing circumstances in India. He also explores the company's multifarious interactions with the domestic economy and society, and sheds important new light on its substantial contributions to the development of Britain's imperial state, public finances, military strength, trade and industry. This book will appeal to all those interested in imperial, economic and business history.

Download or read book Music and Empire in Britain and India written by Bob van der Linden and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-08-20 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Music has been neglected by imperial historians, but this book shows that music is an essential aspect of identity formation and cross-cultural exchange. It explores the ways in which rational, moral, and aesthetic motives underlying the institutionalization of "classical" music converged and diverged in Britain and India from 1880-1940.

Download or read book Sahib The British Soldier in India 1750 1914 written by Richard Holmes and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2011-10-06 with total page 856 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sahib is a magnificent history of the British soldier in India from Clive to the end of Empire, making full use of personal accounts from the soldiers who served in the jewel in Britain’s Imperial Crown.