Author: William Dalrymple Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1526634015 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 577
Book Description
THE TOP 5 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S BEST BOOKS OF 2019 THE TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR FINALIST FOR THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE 2020 LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2019 A FINANCIAL TIMES, OBSERVER, DAILY TELEGRAPH, WALL STREET JOURNAL AND TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 'Dalrymple is a superb historian with a visceral understanding of India ... A book of beauty' – Gerard DeGroot, The Times In August 1765 the East India Company defeated the young Mughal emperor and forced him to establish a new administration in his richest provinces. Run by English merchants who collected taxes using a ruthless private army, this new regime saw the East India Company transform itself from an international trading corporation into something much more unusual: an aggressive colonial power in the guise of a multinational business. William Dalrymple tells the remarkable story of the East India Company as it has never been told before, unfolding a timely cautionary tale of the first global corporate power.
Author: George McGilvary Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 0857713124 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 343
Book Description
A biography of a seemingly forgotten yet singularly important eighteenth century figure, this book includes revealing insights into the business and political landscape of his day, and explores both his professional and personal life, essential for histories of Britain and the Empire. Laurence Sulivan embodied the East India Company. He lived at the Company's heart in the city of London and controlled a vast commercial and political empire during Britain's 'Commercial Revolution', in the late eighteenth century, and rise to superpower status and supremacy in India and South and Southeast Asia. He was 'kingmaker', politician, manipulator and negotiator, deeply involved in British and Indian affairs, friend and confident of Chatham, Clive, Burke and Pitt the Younger and - very importantly - protector of Warren Hastings. George K. McGilvary paints a vivid and convincing picture of a supremely influential and colourful business figure as he controlled the most powerful private company of his day - and at the centre of the eighteenth century public-private nexus in business and government.
Author: Ferdinand Mount Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1471129454 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 809
Book Description
The Tears of the Rajasis a sweeping history of the British in India, seen through the experiences of a single Scottish family. For a century the Lows of Clatto survived mutiny, siege, debt and disease, everywhere from the heat of Madras to the Afghan snows. They lived through the most appalling atrocities and retaliated with some of their own. Each of their lives, remarkable in itself, contributes to the story of the whole fragile and imperilled, often shockingly oppressive and devious but now and then heroic and poignant enterprise. On the surface, John and Augusta Low and their relations may seem imperturbable, but in their letters and diaries they often reveal their loneliness and desperation and their doubts about what they are doing in India. The Lows are the family of the author's grandmother, and a recurring theme of the book is his own discovery of them and of those parts of the history of the British in India which posterity has preferred to forget. The book brings to life not only the most dramatic incidents of their careers - the massacre at Vellore, the conquest of Java, the deposition of the boy-king of Oudh, the disasters in Afghanistan, the Reliefs of Lucknow and Chitral - but also their personal ordeals: the bankruptcies in Scotland and Calcutta, the plagues and fevers, the deaths of children and deaths in childbirth. And it brings to life too the unrepeatable strangeness of their lives: the camps and the palaces they lived in, the balls and the flirtations in the hill stations, and the hot slow rides through the dust. An epic saga of love, war, intrigue and treachery, The Tears of the Rajas is surely destined to become a classic of its kind.
Author: William Dalrymple Publisher: Philip Wilson Publishers ISBN: 1781301018 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 42
Book Description
As the East India Company extended its sway across India in the late eighteenth century, many remarkable artworks were commissioned by Company officials from Indian painters who had previously worked for the Mughals. Published to coincide with the first UK exhibition of these masterworks at The Wallace Collection, this book celebrates the work of a series of extraordinary Indian artists, each with their own style and tastes and agency, all of whom worked for British patrons between the 1770s and the bloody end of the Mughal rule in 1857. Edited by writer and historian William Dalrymple, these hybrid paintings explore both the beauty of the Indian natural world and the social realities of the time in one hundred masterpieces, often of astonishing brilliance and originality. They shed light on a forgotten moment in Anglo-Indian history during which Indian artists responded to European influences while keeping intact their own artistic visions and styles. These artists represent the last phase of Indian artistic genius before the onset of the twin assaults - photography and the influence of western colonial art schools - ended an unbroken tradition of painting going back two thousand years. As these masterworks show, the greatest of these painters deserve to be remembered as among the most remarkable Indian artists of all time.
Author: William Dalrymple Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA ISBN: 1635574331 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 576
Book Description
Finalist for the Cundill History Prize ONE OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY The Wall Street Journal and NPR “Superb ... A vivid and richly detailed story ... worth reading by everyone.” -The New York Times Book Review From the bestselling author of Return of a King, the story of how the East India Company took over large swaths of Asia, and the devastating results of the corporation running a country. In August 1765, the East India Company defeated the young Mughal emperor and set up, in his place, a government run by English traders who collected taxes through means of a private army. The creation of this new government marked the moment that the East India Company ceased to be a conventional company and became something much more unusual: an international corporation transformed into an aggressive colonial power. Over the course of the next 47 years, the company's reach grew until almost all of India south of Delhi was effectively ruled from a boardroom in the city of London. The Anarchy tells one of history's most remarkable stories: how the Mughal Empire-which dominated world trade and manufacturing and possessed almost unlimited resources-fell apart and was replaced by a multinational corporation based thousands of miles overseas, and answerable to shareholders, most of whom had never even seen India and no idea about the country whose wealth was providing their dividends. Using previously untapped sources, Dalrymple tells the story of the East India Company as it has never been told before and provides a portrait of the devastating results from the abuse of corporate power. Bronze Medal in the 2020 Arthur Ross Book Award
Author: Victoria Glendinning Publisher: ISBN: 9781846686047 Category : Colonial administrators Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
In 1819 Sir Stamford Raffles, without authority from London, raised the British flag on a small jungle-covered island and founded a settlement which would become the city state of Singapore. It was the crowning moment in an extraordinary career in South-East Asia, which saw Raffles shake off his humble beginnings to become Lieutenant-Governor of Java. But his success in the tropics was overshadowed by professional conflict and personal tragedy. Acclaimed biographer Victoria Glendinning charts the extraordinary life of an English adventurer, disobedient employee of the East India Company, utopian imperialist, linguist, naturalist, collector and troublesome visionary. If Raffles' own end was tragic, the mark he left on the world is indelible. His name and fame are undimmed today and, as he hoped, Singapore has become his lasting monument.
Author: William Dalrymple Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA ISBN: 1635570778 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 307
Book Description
From the internationally acclaimed and bestselling historians William Dalrymple and Anita Anand, the first comprehensive and authoritative history of the Koh-i-Noor diamond, arguably the most celebrated jewel in the world. On March 29, 1849, the ten-year-old leader of the Sikh kingdom of the Punjab was ushered into the magnificent Mirrored Hall at the center of the British fort in Lahore, India. There, in a formal Act of Submission, the frightened but dignified child handed over to the British East India Company swathes of the richest land in India and the single most valuable object in the subcontinent: the celebrated Koh-i-Noor diamond, otherwise known as the Mountain of Light. To celebrate the acquisition, the British East India Company commissioned a history of the diamond woven together from the gossip of the Delhi Bazaars. From that moment forward, the Koh-i-Noor became the most famous and mythological diamond in history, with thousands of people coming to see it at the 1851 Great Exhibition and still more thousands repeating the largely fictitious account of its passage through history. Using original eyewitness accounts and chronicles never before translated into English, Dalrymple and Anand trace the true history of the diamond and disperse the myths and fantastic tales that have long surrounded this awe-inspiring jewel. The resulting history of south and central Asia tells a true tale of greed, conquest, murder, torture, colonialism, and appropriation that shaped a continent and the Koh-i-Noor itself.
Author: David Gilmour Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN: 0374116857 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: Deborah Cohen Publisher: Penguin UK ISBN: 0141959576 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 400
Book Description
A Sunday Telegraph and Times Higher Education 'Book of the Week', Deborah Cohen's Family Secrets is a gripping book about what families - Victorian and modern - try to hide, and why. In an Edinburgh town house, a genteel maiden lady frets with her brother over their niece's downy upper lip. Would the darkening shadow betray the girl's Eurasian heritage? On a Liverpool railway platform, a heartbroken mother hands over her eight-year old illegitimate son for adoption. She had dressed him carefully that morning in a sailor suit and cap. In a town in the Cotswolds, a vicar brings to his bank vault a diary - sewed up in calico, wrapped in parchment - that chronicles his sexual longings for other men. Drawing upon years of research in previously sealed records, the prize-winning historian Deborah Cohen offers a sweeping and often surprising account of how shame has changed over the last two centuries. Both a story of family secrets and of how they were revealed, this book journeys from the frontier of empire, where British adventurers made secrets that haunted their descendants for generations, to the confessional vanguard of modern-day genealogy two centuries later. It explores personal, apparently idiosyncratic, decisions: hiding an adopted daughter's origins, taking a disabled son to a garden party, talking ceaselessly (or not at all) about a homosexual uncle. In delving into the familial dynamics of shame and guilt, Family Secrets investigates the part that families, so often regarded as the agents of repression, have played in the transformation of social mores from the Victorian era to the present day. Written with compassion and keen insight, this is a bold new argument about the sea-changes that took place behind closed doors. Born into a family with its own fair share of secrets, Deborah Cohen was raised in Kentucky and educated at Harvard and Berkeley.She teaches at Northwestern University, where she holds the Peter B. Ritzma Professorship of the Humanities.Her last book was the award-winning Household Gods, a history of the British love-affair with the home.
Author: Willem Ysbrandsz Bontekoe Publisher: Psychology Press ISBN: 0415344727 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 175
Book Description
Bontekoe's East Indian Voyage was one of the most popular books in which the Dutch seventeenth century public delighted and it continued to be reprinted throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Author: William Dalrymple
Author: George McGilvary
Author: Ferdinand Mount
Author: William Dalrymple
Author: William Dalrymple
Author: Victoria Glendinning
Author: William Dalrymple
Author: David Gilmour
Author: Deborah Cohen
Author: Willem Ysbrandsz Bontekoe