The Business of Empire

The Business of Empire
Author: H. V. Bowen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2005-12-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1139447882
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The Business of Empire assesses the domestic impact of British imperial expansion by analysing what happened in Britain following the East India Company's acquisition of a vast territorial empire in South Asia. Drawing on a mass of hitherto unused material contained in the company's administrative and financial records, the book offers a reconstruction of the inner workings of the company as it made the remarkable transition from business to empire during the late-eighteenth century. H. V. Bowen profiles the company's stockholders and directors and examines how those in London adapted their methods, working practices, and policies to changing circumstances in India. He also explores the company's multifarious interactions with the domestic economy and society, and sheds important new light on its substantial contributions to the development of Britain's imperial state, public finances, military strength, trade and industry. This book will appeal to all those interested in imperial, economic and business history.

How the East Was Won

How the East Was Won
Author: Andrew Phillips
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 662
Release: 2021-10-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1009064193
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How did upstart outsiders forge vast new empires in early modern Asia, laying the foundations for today's modern mega-states of India and China? In How the East Was Won, Andrew Phillips reveals the crucial parallels uniting the Mughal Empire, the Qing Dynasty and the British Raj. Vastly outnumbered and stigmatised as parvenus, the Mughals and Manchus pioneered similar strategies of cultural statecraft, first to build the multicultural coalitions necessary for conquest, and then to bind the indigenous collaborators needed to subsequently uphold imperial rule. The English East India Company later adapted the same 'define and conquer' and 'define and rule' strategies to carve out the West's biggest colonial empire in Asia. Refuting existing accounts of the 'rise of the West', this book foregrounds the profoundly imitative rather than innovative character of Western colonialism to advance a new explanation of how universal empires arise and endure.

The Anarchy

The Anarchy
Author: William Dalrymple
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 577
Release: 2020-11-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1526634015
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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.

Faithful Victorian

Faithful Victorian
Author: Mark Donoghue
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2016-07-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 1137587733
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This book weaves William Thomas Thornton’s life story into the larger themes of his diverse writings whose purpose was to expose ambiguities and contradictions in politics, economics, metaphysics and religion. Thornton was a poet, an intrepid traveler, a biographer, an essayist, an imperial mandarin, and a dutiful family man. Thornton joined the East India Company in the mid-1830s, rising to become Secretary of the India Office’s Department of Public Works. This study uses Thornton’s letters and other recently-discovered primary material to provide a fascinating account that returns his compelling life to the center of nineteenth-century British intellectual thought.