Plain Tales From The Raj

Plain Tales From The Raj PDF Author: Charles Allen
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0349142149
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
The Raj was, for two hundred years, the jewel in the British imperial crown. Although founded on military expansionism and undoubted exploitation, it developed over the centuries into what has been called 'benign autocracy' - the government of many by few, with the active collaboration of most Indians in recognition of a desire for the advancement of their country. Charles Allen's classic oral history of the period that marked the end of British rule was first published a generation ago. Now reissued as the imperial century closes, this brilliantly insightful and bestselling collection of reminiscences illustrates the unique experience of British India: the sadness and luxury for some; the joy and deprivation for others.

The Scandal of Empire

The Scandal of Empire PDF Author: Nicholas B. Dirks
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674034260
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 413

Book Description
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.

Women of the Raj

Women of the Raj PDF Author: Margaret MacMillan
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0812976398
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 394

Book Description
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

Empire Families

Empire Families PDF Author: Elizabeth Buettner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199249075
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325

Book Description
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 Britonsneither 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.

Tales From the Dark Continent

Tales From the Dark Continent PDF Author: Charles Allen
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0349142173
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 198

Book Description
Charles Allen captures the vanished world of British Colonial Africa in the recollections of the pioneering men and women who lived and worked there.

Tales From The South China Seas

Tales From The South China Seas PDF Author: Charles Allen
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0349142165
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Book Description
This work chronicles the adventures of the last generation of British men and women who went East to seek their fortunes. Drawn into the colonial territories scattered around the South China Sea, they found themselves in an exotic, intoxicating world. It was a land of rickshaws and shanghai jars, sampans and Straits Steamers, set against a background of palm-fringed beaches and tropical rain-forests. But it was also a world of conflicting beliefs and many races, where the overlapping of widely differing moral standards and viewpoints created a heady and dangerous atmosphere.

Kipling Sahib

Kipling Sahib PDF Author: Charles Allen
Publisher: Abacus
ISBN: 0349142157
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 277

Book Description
Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865 and spent his early years there, before being sent, aged six, to England, a desperately unhappy experience. Charles Allen's great-grandfather brought the sixteen-year-old Kipling out to Lahore to work on The Civil and Military Gazette with the words 'Kipling will do', and thus set young Rudyard on his literary course. And so it was that at the start of the cold weather of 1882 he stepped ashore at Bombay on 18 October 1882 - 'a prince entering his kingdom'. He stayed for seven years during which he wrote the work that established him as a popular and critical, sometimes controversial, success. Charles Allen has written a brilliant account of those years - of an Indian childhood and coming of age, of abandonment in England, of family and Empire. He traces the Indian experiences of Kipling's parents, Lockwood and Alice and reveals what kind of culture the young writer was born into and then returned to when still a teenager. It is a work of fantastic sympathy for a man - though not blind to Kipling's failings - and the country he loved.

The Representation of Imperialism in Rudyard Kipling's 'Plain Tales from the Hills'

The Representation of Imperialism in Rudyard Kipling's 'Plain Tales from the Hills' PDF Author: Nadja Grebe
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3640967062
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 65

Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswald (Institut für Fremdsprachliche Philologien), course: Imagining the Nation: From the British Empire to Multicultural Britain, language: English, abstract: One of the most influential and well-known authors during the time of the British Empire and still today is without doubt Rudyard Kipling. Whether or not his political views can be agreed upon, he nevertheless represents a great part of English literature. He wrote numerous novels, short stories and poems and was even awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. (cf. Green 22) Along with this great success, however, came also a spate of criticism leading to an "ambivalent attitude towards the author and his work" (Gilbert: xvii). Herein lays the prominent reason for writing a paper on colonialism: in the controversial portray of Rudyard Kipling. Some authors like Henry James view him as "the most complete man of genius [to be] ever known" (159) whilst others see him as a "jingo imperialist [...] morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting" (Orwell 74). The majority of Kipling's work has been written during the peak times of the British Empire and takes same one as thematic playground. Kipling is said to have created "not only the best but almost the only literary picture [of Anglo-India]." (Orwell 82) and thus resemble a suitable foundation for analysis. Hence, it shall be examined what picture of Imperialism with particular reference to Indian colony and its inhabitants as subjects to the Royal government as well as the role of the English in India, is created in Rudyard Kipling's work. Is it really as Fabian Schefold proposes, that Kipling's writing is furnished with racist and imperialist ideas, presenting Britain as racial superior to India? (cf. 59-60) Or is it as Edgar Mertner suggests, that Kipling was rather critic of the British rule in India co
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