[PDF] India In Britain eBook

Author : David Gilmour
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 641 pages
File Size : 12,82 MB
Release : 2018-11-13
Category : History
ISBN : 0374116857

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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 : Shashi Tharoor
Publisher : Penguin Group
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 47,81 MB
Release : 2018-02
Category : History
ISBN : 9780141987149

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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.

Author : Susheila Nasta
Publisher : Springer
Page : 247 pages
File Size : 26,47 MB
Release : 2012-11-16
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0230392725

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Moving away from orthodox narratives of the Raj and British presence in India, this book examines the significance of the networks and connections that South Asians established on British soil. Looking at the period 1858-1950, it presents readings of cultural history and points to the urgent need to open up the parameters of this field of study.

Author : Jon Wilson
Publisher : PublicAffairs
Page : 586 pages
File Size : 36,8 MB
Release : 2016-10-25
Category : History
ISBN : 1610392949

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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 : Thomas R. Trautmann
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 276 pages
File Size : 47,99 MB
Release : 2023-07-28
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0520917928

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"Aryan," a word that today evokes images of racial hatred and atrocity, was first used by Europeans to suggest bonds of kinship, as Thomas Trautmann shows in his far-reaching history of British Orientalism and the ethnology of India. When the historical relationship uniting Sanskrit with the languages of Europe was discovered, it seemed clear that Indians and Britons belonged to the same family. Thus the Indo-European or Aryan idea, based on the principle of linguistic kinship, dominated British ethnological inquiry. In the nineteenth century, however, an emergent biological "race science" attacked the authority of the Orientalists. The spectacle of a dark-skinned people who were evidently civilized challenged Victorian ideas, and race science responded to the enigma of India by redefining the Aryan concept in narrowly "white" racial terms. By the end of the nineteenth century, race science and Orientalism reached a deep and lasting consensus in regard to India, which Trautmann calls "the racial theory of Indian civilization," and which he undermines with his powerful analysis of colonial ethnology in India. His work of reassessing British Orientalism and the Aryan idea will be of great interest to historians, anthropologists, and cultural critics.

Author : Peter van der Veer
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 216 pages
File Size : 45,32 MB
Release : 2020-06-30
Category : Religion
ISBN : 1400831083

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Picking up on Edward Said's claim that the historical experience of empire is common to both the colonizer and the colonized, Peter van der Veer takes the case of religion to examine the mutual impact of Britain's colonization of India on Indian and British culture. He shows that national culture in both India and Britain developed in relation to their shared colonial experience and that notions of religion and secularity were crucial in imagining the modern nation in both countries. In the process, van der Veer chronicles how these notions developed in the second half of the nineteenth century in relation to gender, race, language, spirituality, and science. Avoiding the pitfalls of both world systems theory and national historiography, this book problematizes oppositions between modern and traditional, secular and religious, progressive and reactionary. It shows that what often are assumed to be opposites are, in fact, profoundly entangled. In doing so, it upsets the convenient fiction that India is the land of eternal religion, existing outside of history, while Britain is the epitome of modern secularity and an agent of history. Van der Veer also accounts for the continuing role of religion in British culture and the strong part religion has played in the development of Indian civil society. This masterly work of scholarship brings into view the effects of the very close encounter between India and Britain--an intimate encounter that defined the character of both nations.

Author : Penderel Moon
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 1274 pages
File Size : 50,96 MB
Release : 1989
Category : History
ISBN :

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For some years before his death the veteran India hand Sir Penderel Moon was engaged in what was to be the culmination of his lifes work: a large-scale history of the two centuries of British involvement in India â from the battle of Plassey to the final independence of India and Pakistan some forty years ago. It is a masterly account of men and events. Part One describes the conquests of the East India Company in the wake of the disintegrating Moghul empire, and the gradual development of an administrative system. A major theme is the haphazard nature of the growth of British rule and the general ineffectiveness of the home authorities. Another is the conflict of attitudes between those who wish to replace Indian with English ways and those concerned to preserve what was best in Indias ancient civilization. The watershed was the disastrous Mutiny of 1857. Part Two describes the eighty-nine years during which India was ruled directly from Whitehall and the growing demand by Indians for self-government (fed by literal ideas from the British themselves). The more far-sighted has long recognized this as inevitable, though few if any had foreseen that the end of British rule would mean the loss of Indian unity. --