Author: Lawrence James Publisher: Macmillan ISBN: 9780312263829 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 768
Book Description
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.
Author: James Crabtree Publisher: Crown ISBN: 1524760072 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 418
Book Description
A colorful and revealing portrait of the rise of India’s new billionaire class in a radically unequal society India is the world’s largest democracy, with more than one billion people and an economy expanding faster than China’s. But the rewards of this growth have been far from evenly shared, and the country’s top 1% now own nearly 60% of its wealth. In megacities like Mumbai, where half the population live in slums, the extraordinary riches of India’s new dynasties echo the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers of America's Gilded Age, funneling profits from huge conglomerates into lifestyles of conspicuous consumption. James Crabtree’s The Billionaire Raj takes readers on a personal journey to meet these reclusive billionaires, fugitive tycoons, and shadowy political power brokers. From the sky terrace of the world’s most expensive home to impoverished villages and mass political rallies, Crabtree dramatizes the battle between crony capitalists and economic reformers, revealing a tense struggle between equality and privilege playing out against a combustible backdrop of aspiration, class, and caste. The Billionaire Raj is a vivid account of a divided society on the cusp of transformation—and a struggle that will shape not just India’s future, but the world’s.
Author: David Gilmour Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN: 0374713243 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 641
Book Description
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.
Author: Vyvyen Brendon Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson ISBN: 1780227477 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 349
Book Description
Vyvyen Brendon's evocative, at times heart-tugging book, runs from the 18th century and the East India Company, through the Afghan wars, the Indian mutiny and the more settled era of the Queen Empress, and culminates in the conflict leading to Britain's hurried exit in 1947. Its subject is the young progeny of traders, soldiers, civil servants, missionaries, planters, engineers and what should be done with them. Until the coming of air travel these children often only saw their parents every few years. Then there were the children born of Anglo-Indian marriages and affairs. Sent back to Britain they were often reviled as 'darkies', 'a touch of the tar-brush'. And then there were the children educated in India. Brendon reveals appalling stories of abuse at the hands of servants. What frequently unites Brendon's wildly different subjects is their loneliness--drawing on letters, diaries, memoirs and interviews, she portrays children who had to discipline themselves to adapt (often ingeniously) to unfamiliar cultures, far away from family and forced to spend termtime in boarding schools and holidays with unfamiliar families.
Author: James Mulholland Publisher: JHU Press ISBN: 1421439611 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 313
Book Description
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.
Author: Bhavani Raman Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226703274 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 294
Book Description
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.
Author: Jon Wilson Publisher: PublicAffairs ISBN: 1610392949 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 586
Book Description
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.
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
Author: Ramachandra Guha Publisher: Knopf ISBN: 1101874848 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 496
Book Description
An extraordinary history of resistance and the fight for Indian independence—the little-known story of seven foreigners to India who joined the movement fighting for freedom from British colonial rule. Rebels Against the Raj tells the story of seven people who chose to struggle for a country other than their own: foreigners to India who across the late 19th to late 20th century arrived to join the freedom movement fighting for independence from British colonial rule. Of the seven, four were British, two American, and one Irish. Four men, three women. Before and after being jailed or deported they did remarkable and pioneering work in a variety of fields: journalism, social reform, education, the emancipation of women, environmentalism. This book tells their stories, each renegade motivated by idealism and genuine sacrifice; each connected to Gandhi, though some as acolytes where others found endless infuriation in his views; each understanding they would likely face prison sentences for their resistance, and likely live and die in India; each one leaving a profound impact on the region in which they worked, their legacies continuing through the institutions they founded and the generations and individuals they inspired. Through these entwined lives, wonderfully told by one of the world’s finest historians, we reach deep insights into relations between India and the West, and India’s story as a country searching for its identity and liberty beyond British colonial rule.
Author: Zareer Masani Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 9780520071278 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 182
Book Description
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.
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Author: Lawrence James
Author: James Crabtree
Author: David Gilmour
Author: Vyvyen Brendon
Author: James Mulholland
Author: Bhavani Raman
Author: Jon Wilson
Author: Margaret MacMillan
Author: Ramachandra Guha
Author: Zareer Masani