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 Raj written by Lawrence James and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2000-08-12 with total page 768 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the critically acclaimed author of "The Rise and Fall of the British Empire" comes an unapologetic revisionist history of British rule in India. James recounts the twists and turns of imperialism and independence with a wealth of new material. 8-page photo insert.
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 Indian Tales of the Raj written by Zareer Masani and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As rich and varied as India itself, these accounts bring to the reader the Indian perspective on the British Raj. Included are the memories and experiences of more than fifty Indian men and women who worked under the British, made friends with them, and then fought to throw them out. They describe the role of apprentice under the sahibs, the complex racial barriers that divided the rulers from the ruled, the Western education which eventually encouraged rebellion, and the ways in which liberal British political arguments were turned against the Raj by nationalist campaigns to force the British to quit India.
Download or read book Women of the Raj written by Margaret MacMillan and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2007-10-09 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the nineteenth century, at the height of colonialism, the British ruled India under a government known as the Raj. British men and women left their homes and traveled to this mysterious, beautiful country–where they attempted to replicate their own society. In this fascinating portrait, Margaret MacMillan examines the hidden lives of the women who supported their husbands’ conquests–and in turn supported the Raj, often behind the scenes and out of the history books. Enduring heartbreaking separations from their families, these women had no choice but to adapt to their strange new home, where they were treated with incredible deference by the natives but found little that was familiar. The women of the Raj learned to cope with the harsh Indian climate and ward off endemic diseases; they were forced to make their own entertainment–through games, balls, and theatrics–and quickly learned to abide by the deeply ingrained Anglo-Indian love of hierarchy. Weaving interviews, letters, and memoirs with a stunning selection of illustrations, MacMillan presents a vivid cultural and social history of the daughters, sisters, mothers, and wives of the men at the center of a daring imperialist experiment–and reveals India in all its richness and vitality. “A marvellous book . . . [Women of the Raj] successfully [re-creates] a vanished world that continues to hold a fascination long after the sun has set on the British empire.” –The Globe and Mail “MacMillan has that essential quality of the historian, a narrative gift.” –The Daily Telegraph “MacMillan is a superb writer who can bring history to life.” –The Philadelphia Inquirer “Well researched and thoroughly enjoyable.” –Evening Standard
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 Stones of Empire written by Jan Morris and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2005 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The attitude of the British to India was compounded partly of arrogance, but partly also of homesickness, and it shows in their constructions. Georgian terraces were adapted to tropical conditions, Victorian railway stations were elaborately orientalised, and seaside villas were adjusted to suit Himalayan conditions. This book, now reissued with a new introduction by Simon Winchester, is the first to describe the whole range of British constructions in India. Stones of Empire charts an enterprise in architecture, engineering, and social adaptation unique in human history.
Download or read book Before the Raj written by James Mulholland and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction: Translocal Anglo-India -- A Cultural Company-State and the Colonial Public Sphere -- Newspapers and Reading Publics in Eighteenth-Century India -- The Vagrant Muse: Fashioning Reputation across Eurasia -- Undoing Britain in Bengal -- Tristram Shandy in Bombay -- Agonies of Empire: Captivity Narratives and the Mysore Wars, 1767-1799 -- Literary Culture of Colonial Outposts: Penang, Sumatra, Java, 1771-1816.
Download or read book Married to the empire written by Mary A. Procida and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-01 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Married to the empire, Mary A. Procida provides a new approach to the growing history of women and empire by situating women at the centre of the practices and policies of British imperialism. Rebutting interpretations that have marginalized women in the empire, this book demonstrates that women were crucial to establishing and sustaining the British Raj in India from the "High Noon" of imperialism in the late nineteenth century through to Indian independence in 1947. Using three separate modes of engagement with imperialism – domesticity, violence, and race – Procida demonstrates the many and varied ways in which British women, particularly the wives of imperial officials, created a role for themselves in the empire. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including memoirs, novels, interviews, and government records, the book examines how marriage provided a role for women in the empire, looks at the home as a site for the construction of imperial power, analyses British women's commitment to violence as a means of preserving the empire, and discusses the relationship among Indian and British men and women. Married to the empire is essential reading to students of British imperial history and women's history, as well as those with an interest in the wider history of the British Empire.
Download or read book Imprint of the Raj written by Chandak Sengoopta and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating account of the invention of fingerprinting in colonial India and the story of how the technique was exported back to Victorian England. Opening with the first case in a British criminal court to use the radical new technique of fingerprinting to identify the perpetrators of crime in 1902 this riveting book takes us back to the origins of fingerprinting in India. Despite many books on the subject of fingerprints in general, none have looked closely at the fact that this standard tool of forensic science was born in India during the Raj. As the author points out, with the exception of curry there is not one other instance of something so fundamental to British life being imported fully-formed from the Empire and then being tailored to fit conditions at home. Based on original and hitherto unpublished research imprint of the Raj gives a unique insight into our colonial past and offers a vivid account of this extraordinary and largely ignored story.
Download or read book Ideologies of the Raj written by Thomas R. Metcalf and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-02-27 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ideologies of the Raj examines how the British sought to justify their rule over India. The author argues that two divergent strategies were devised to legitimate their authority: the one defined characteristics which the Indians shared with the British themselves, while the other emphasised qualities of enduring 'difference'. In the end, however, the differences predominated in the colonial view of India. Since the British constructed few explicit ideologies of empire, the author explores the workings of the Raj through the study of its underlying assumptions as revealed in policies and writings. Students of modern India and the British Empire will find Thomas Metcalf's book relevant and accessible.
Download or read book An Imperial Vision written by Thomas R. Metcalf and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2002 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book looks at the relationship between culture and power expressed in architectural forms employed by the British in India. These buildings reflect the choices made by the British in their politics as imperial rulers.
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 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 Document Raj written by Bhavani Raman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-11-07 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historians of British colonial rule in India have noted both the place of military might and the imposition of new cultural categories in the making of Empire, but Bhavani Raman, in Document Raj, uncovers a lesser-known story of power: the power of bureaucracy. Drawing on extensive archival research in the files of the East India Company’s administrative offices in Madras, she tells the story of a bureaucracy gone awry in a fever of documentation practices that grew ever more abstract—and the power, both economic and cultural, this created. In order to assert its legitimacy and value within the British Empire, the East India Company was diligent about record keeping. Raman shows, however, that the sheer volume of their document production allowed colonial managers to subtly but substantively manipulate records for their own ends, increasingly drawing the real and the recorded further apart. While this administrative sleight of hand increased the company’s reach and power within the Empire, it also bolstered profoundly new orientations to language, writing, memory, and pedagogy for the officers and Indian subordinates involved. Immersed in a subterranean world of delinquent scribes, translators, village accountants, and entrepreneurial fixers, Document Raj maps the shifting boundaries of the legible and illegible, the legal and illegitimate, that would usher India into the modern world.
Download or read book Cities of Empire written by Tristram Hunt and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2014-11-25 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Originally published in the U.K. in 2014 under the title Ten cities that made an empire, by Allen Lane, London."
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.
