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 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 The British Empire written by Stephen W. Sears and published by New Word City. This book was released on 2014-09-10 with total page 1336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1815, the British controlled the seas. Before the end of the nineteenth century, they ruled Australia, India, New Zealand, half of Africa, half of North America, and islands all around the globe. Theirs was the most powerful empire the world has ever known. Here is the story of how the English acquired their vast domain; how they ruled, maintained, and exploited it; and how, within decades, they presided over its dissolution. Here are Britain's triumphs and also her stinging defeats, her heroes and her scoundrels. It is a full and fascinating chronicle of the growth of the British Empire and its people and of the impact that empire had on the rest of the world.
Download or read book The Great Indian Novel written by Shashi Tharoor and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this award-winning novel, Tharoor has masterfully recast the two-thousand-year-old epic, The Mahabharata, with fictional but highly recognizable events and characters from twentieth-century Indian politics. Nothing is sacred in this deliciously irreverent, witty, and deeply intelligent retelling of modern Indian history and the ancient Indian epic The Mahabharata. Alternately outrageous and instructive, hilarious and moving, it is a dazzling tapestry of prose and verse that satirically, but also poignantly, chronicles the struggle for Indian freedom and independence.
Download or read book The British Seaborne Empire written by Jeremy Black and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Britain's seaborne tradition is used to throw light on the British themselves, the people with whom they came into contact and the British perception of empire. The oceans and their shores, rather than the mysterious interiors of continents, certainly dominated the English perception of the transoceanic world in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, climaxing in the fascination with the Pacific in the age of Captain Cook, and continuing into the nineteenth century, with Franklin in the Arctic and Ross in the Antarctic. The oceans offered much more than fascination. In England, from the late sixteenth century, maritime conflict and imperial strength were seen as important to national morale and reputation and without it there would have been no empire, or at least not in the form it actually took."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book India From Midnight to the Millennium written by Shashi Tharoor and published by Penguin Books India. This book was released on 2000 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: &Lsquo;Well-Balanced, Informative And Highly Readable&Rsquo;&Mdash;Amartya Sen India: From Midnight To The Millennium And Beyond Is An Eloquent Argument For The Importance Of India To The Future Of The Industrialized World. Shashi Tharoor Shows Compellingly That India Stands At The Intersection Of The Most Significant Questions Facing The World Today. If Democracy Leads To Inefficient Political Infighting, Should It Be Sacrificed In The Interest Of Economic Well-Being? Does Religious Fundamentalism Provide A Way For Countries In The Developing World To Assert Their Identity In The Face Of Western Hegemony, Or Is There A Case For Pluralism And Diversity Amid Cultural And Religious Traditions? Does The Entry Of Western Consumer Goods Threaten A Country&Rsquo;S Economic Self-Sufficiency, And Is Protectionism The Only Guarantee Of Independence? The Answers To Such Questions Will Determine What The Nature Of Our World Is In The Twenty-First Century. And Since Indians Account For Almost One-Sixth Of The World&Rsquo;S Population Today, Their Choices Will Resonate Throughout The Globe. Shashi Tharoor Deals With This Vast Theme In A Work Of Remarkable Depth And Startling Originality, Combining Elements Of Political Scholarship, Personal Reflection, Memoir, Fiction, And Polemic, All Illuminated In Vivid And Compelling Prose.
Download or read book Empire Families written by Elizabeth Buettner and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2004-07-01 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What was life like for the British men, women, and children who lived in late imperial India while serving the Raj? Empire Families treats the Raj as a family affair and examines how, and why, many remained linked with India over several generations. Due to the fact that India was never meant for permanent European settlement, many families developed deep-rooted ties with India while never formally emigrating. Their lives were dominated by long periods of residence abroad punctuated by repeated travels between Britain and India: childhood overseas followed by separation from parents and education in Britain; adult returns to India through careers or marriage; furloughs, and ultimately retirement, in Britain. As a result, many Britons neither felt themselves to be rooted in India, nor felt completely at home when back in Britain. Their permanent impermanence led to the creation of distinct social realities and cultural identities. Empire Families sets out to recreate this society by looking at a series of families, their lives in India, and their travels back to Britain. Focusing for the first time on the experiences of parents and children alike, and including the Beveridge, Butler, Orwell, and Kipling families, Elizabeth Buettner uncovers the meanings of growing up in the Raj and an itinerant imperial lifestyle.
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 A Critique from the Left written by Avi Bachenheimer and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2018-08-04 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shashi Tharoor’s “Inglorious Empire” is an account of “What the British did to India”. The book is composed in eight chapters through which Tharoor deals with the implications of two centuries of British colonialism. The author assembles a thematic record of deliberate policies pursued by the British aristocracy and he examines how those strategies in action, led to the depredation and looting of the Indian resources, starvation of its people, fragmentation of its social identity and destruction of its cultural and economic base in the course of two centuries. Tharoor’s book is not a chronology of the British colonial machinery and it should not be treated so. The narrative is shaped to converge in certain historical events – such as partition of India – in a flowing arrangement of themes that are the over-arching characteristic of the record the author is providing.
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 584 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 Empire s New Clothes written by Philip Murphy and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the wake of Brexit, the Commonwealth has been identified as an important body for future British trade and diplomacy, but few know what it actually does. How is it organized and what has held it together for so long? How important is the Queen's role as Head of the Commonwealth? Most importantly, why has it had such a troubled recent past, and is it realistic to imagine that its fortunes might be reversed?In The Empire's New Clothes,? Murphy strips away the gilded self-image of the Commonwealth to reveal an irrelevant institution afflicted by imperial amnesia. He offers a personal perspective on this complex and poorly understood institution, and asks if it can ever escape from the shadow of the British Empire to become an organization based on shared values, rather than a shared history.
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 . This book was released on 1999 with total page 794 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Colonel Who Would Not Repent written by Salil Tripathi and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-26 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bangladesh was once East Pakistan, the Muslim nation carved out of the Indian Subcontinent when it gained independence from Britain in 1947. As religion alone could not keep East Pakistan and West Pakistan together, Bengali-speaking East Pakistan fought for and achieved liberation in 1971. Coups and assassinations followed, and two decades later it completed its long, tumultuous transition to parliamentary government. Its history is complex and tragic—one of war, natural disaster, starvation, corruption, and political instability. First published in India by the Aleph Book Company, Salil Tripathi’s lyrical, beautifully wrought tale of the difficult birth and conflict-ridden politics of this haunted land has received international critical acclaim, and his reporting has been honored with a Mumbai Press Club Red Ink Award for Excellence in Journalism. The Colonel Who Would Not Repent is an insightful study of a nation struggling to survive and define itself.
Download or read book Empireland written by Sathnam Sanghera and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2023-02-28 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A best-selling journalist’s illuminating tour through the hidden legacies and modern realities of British empire that exposes how much of the present-day United Kingdom is actually rooted in its colonial past. Empireland boldly and lucidly makes the case that in order to understand America, we must first understand British imperialism. "Empireland is brilliantly written, deeply researched and massively important. It’ll stay in your head for years.” —John Oliver, Emmy Award-winning host of "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver" With a new introduction by the author and a foreword by Booker Prize-winner Marlon James A best-selling journalist’s illuminating tour through the hidden legacies and modern realities of British empire that exposes how much of the present-day United Kingdom is actually rooted in its colonial past. Empireland boldly and lucidly makes the case that in order to understand America, we must first understand British imperialism. Empire—whether British or otherwise—informs nearly everything we do. From common thought to our daily routines; from the foundations of social safety nets to the realities of racism; and from the distrust of public intellectuals to the exceptionalism that permeates immigration debates, the Brexit campaign and the global reckonings with controversial memorials, Empireland shows how the pernicious legacy of Western imperialism undergirds our everyday lives, yet remains shockingly obscured from view. In accessible, witty prose, award-winning journalist and best-selling author Sathnam Sanghera traces this legacy back to its source, exposing how—in both profound and innocuous ways—imperial domination has shaped the United Kingdom we know today. Sanghera connects the historical dots across continents and seas to show how the shadows of a colonial past still linger over modern-day Britain and how the world, in turn, was shaped by Britain’s looming hand. The implications, of course, extend to Britain’s most notorious former colony turned imperial power: the United States of America, which prides itself for its maverick soul and yet seems to have inherited all the ambition, brutality and exceptional thinking of its parent. With a foreword by Booker Prize–winner Marlon James, Empireland is a revelatory and lucid work of political history that offers a sobering appraisal of the past so we may move toward a more just future.
Download or read book Indian Summer written by Alex Von Tunzelmann and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2008-09-30 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An extraordinary story of romance, history, and divided loyalties--set against the backdrop of one of the most dramatic events of the 20th century--"Indian Summer" reveals how Britain ceased to be a superpower after it lost India as a colony.
Download or read book Insurgent Empire written by Priyamvada Gopal and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2019-06-25 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How rebellious colonies changed British attitudes to empire Insurgent Empire shows how Britain’s enslaved and colonial subjects were active agents in their own liberation. What is more, they shaped British ideas of freedom and emancipation back in the United Kingdom. Priyamvada Gopal examines a century of dissent on the question of empire and shows how British critics of empire were influenced by rebellions and resistance in the colonies, from the West Indies and East Africa to Egypt and India. In addition, a pivotal role in fomenting resistance was played by anticolonial campaigners based in London, right at the heart of empire. Much has been written on how colonized peoples took up British and European ideas and turned them against empire when making claims to freedom and self-determination. Insurgent Empire sets the record straight in demonstrating that these people were much more than victims of imperialism or, subsequently, the passive beneficiaries of an enlightened British conscience—they were insurgents whose legacies shaped and benefited the nation that once oppressed them.
