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

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.

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.

Imperial Beast Fables

Imperial Beast Fables PDF Author: Kaori Nagai
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030514935
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 259

Book Description
This book coins the term ‘imperial beast fable’ to explore modern forms of human-animal relationships and their origins in the British Empire. Taking as a starting point the long nineteenth-century fascination with non-European beast fables, it examines literary reworkings of these fables, such as Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books, in relation to the global politics of race, language, and species. The imperial beast fable figures variably as a key site where the nature and origins of mankind are hotly debated; an emerging space of conservation in which humans enclose animals to manage and control them; a cage in which an animal narrator talks to change its human jailors; and a vision of animal cosmopolitanism, in which a close kinship between humans and other animals is dreamt of. Written at the intersection of animal studies and postcolonial studies, this book proposes that the beast fable embodies the ideologies and values of the British Empire, while also covertly critiquing them. It therefore finds in the beast fable the possibility that the multitudinous animals it gives voice to might challenge the imperial networks which threaten their existence, both in the nineteenth century and today.

Traumatic Tales

Traumatic Tales PDF Author: Lisa Kasmer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351586238
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 347

Book Description
Traumatic Tales: British Nationhood and National Trauma in Nineteenth-Century Literature explores intersections of nationalism and trauma in Romantic and Victorian literature from the emergence of British nationalism through the height of the British Empire. From the national tales of the early nineteenth century to the socially incisive realist novels that emerged later in the century, nationalism is inescapable in this literature, as much current scholarship acknowledges. Nineteenth-century national trauma, however, has only recently begun to be explored. Taking as its starting point the unsettling effects of nationalism, the essays in this collection expose the violence underlying empire-building, particularly in regard to subject identity. National violence—imperialism, colonialism and warfare—necessarily grounds nation-formation in deep-lying trauma. As the essays demonstrate, such fraught nexus are made visible in national tales as well as in political policy, exposed by means of theoretical and historical analyses to reveal psychological, political, social and individual trauma. This exploration of violence in the construction of national ideology in nineteenth-century Britain rethinks our understanding of cultural memory, national identity, imperialism, and colonialism, recent thrusts of Romantic and Victorian study in nineteenth-century literature.

The Long Recessional

The Long Recessional PDF Author: David Gilmour
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374187029
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Book Description
" Readable and reliable . . . [Gilmour' s] assessment of the political background of Kipling' s writings is exemplary." -- Earl L. Dachslager, "Houston Chronicle" David Gilmour' s superbly nuanced biography of Rudyard Kipling, now available in paperback, is the first to show how the great writer' s life and work mirrored the trajectory of the British Empire, from its zenith to its final decades. His great poem " Recessional" celebrated Queen Victoria' s Diamond Jubilee in 1897 and his last poems warned of the dangers of Nazism, while Kipling himself, an icon of the empire, was transformed from an apostle of success to a prophet of national decline. As Gilmour makes clear, Kipling' s mysterious and enduring works deeply influenced the way his readers saw both themselves and the British Empire, and they continue to challenge our own generation.
Proudly powered by WordPress | Theme: Rits Blog by Crimson Themes.