The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857

The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857
Author: Margot Finn
Publisher: UCL Press
Total Pages: 540
Release: 2018-02-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1787350274

The East India Company at Home, 1757–1857 explores how empire in Asia shaped British country houses, their interiors and the lives of their residents. It includes chapters from researchers based in a wide range of settings such as archives and libraries, museums, heritage organisations, the community of family historians and universities. It moves beyond conventional academic narratives and makes an important contribution to ongoing debates around how empire impacted Britain. The volume focuses on the propertied families of the East India Company at the height of Company rule. From the Battle of Plassey in 1757 to the outbreak of the Indian Uprising in 1857, objects, people and wealth flowed to Britain from Asia. As men in Company service increasingly shifted their activities from trade to military expansion and political administration, a new population of civil servants, army officers, surveyors and surgeons journeyed to India to make their fortunes. These Company men and their families acquired wealth, tastes and identities in India, which travelled home with them to Britain. Their stories, the biographies of their Indian possessions and the narratives of the stately homes in Britain that came to house them, frame our explorations of imperial culture and its British legacies.

Author:
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
Total Pages: 386
Release:
Genre:
ISBN: 3385613418

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

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.

Inglorious Empire

Inglorious Empire
Author: Shashi Tharoor
Publisher: Penguin Group
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780141987149

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.

Mapping an Empire

Mapping an Empire
Author: Matthew H. Edney
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 481
Release: 2009-02-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226184862

In this fascinating history of the British surveys of India, Matthew H. Edney relates how imperial Britain used modern survey techniques to not only create and define the spatial image of its Empire, but also to legitimate its colonialist activities. "There is much to be praised in this book. It is an excellent history of how India came to be painted red in the nineteenth century. But more importantly, Mapping an Empire sets a new standard for books that examine a fundamental problem in the history of European imperialism."—D. Graham Burnett, Times Literary Supplement "Mapping an Empire is undoubtedly a major contribution to the rapidly growing literature on science and empire, and a work which deserves to stimulate a great deal of fresh thinking and informed research."—David Arnold, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History "This case study offers broadly applicable insights into the relationship between ideology, technology and politics. . . . Carefully read, this is a tale of irony about wishful thinking and the limits of knowledge."—Publishers Weekly

The Anarchy

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

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.

Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India

Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India
Author: Robert Travers
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 16
Release: 2007-04-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 1139464167

Robert Travers' analysis of British conquests in late eighteenth-century India shows how new ideas were formulated about the construction of empire. After the British East India Company conquered the vast province of Bengal, Britons confronted the apparent anomaly of a European trading company acting as an Indian ruler. Responding to a prolonged crisis of imperial legitimacy, British officials in Bengal tried to build their authority on the basis of an 'ancient constitution', supposedly discovered among the remnants of the declining Mughal Empire. In the search for an indigenous constitution, British political concepts were redeployed and redefined on the Indian frontier of empire, while stereotypes about 'oriental despotism' were challenged by the encounter with sophisticated Indian state forms. This highly original book uncovers a forgotten style of imperial state-building based on constitutional restoration, and in the process opens up new points of connection between British, imperial and South Asian history.

Problems of Empire

Problems of Empire
Author: P. J. Marshall
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2018-03-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 135112157X

This book, first published in 1968, is a study of the impact made on Britain by the conquest of large parts of India in the second half of the eighteenth century. The sudden success of the East India Company in subjugating a vast population with a sophisticated civilization created problems of an unprecedented kind for Britain. It raised in an acute form questions about the scope and limits of state action, the rights of chartered bodies, the duties of conquerors to subject peoples, the appropriateness of exporting western ideals and concepts of law and government to Asia, and the manner in which the resources of the East could best contribute to Britain's power and wealth. These and similar topics were discussed at length in Parliament, the press, books and pamphlets, and in the correspondence of private individuals. A selection of this material, drawing on a wide and varied range of printed and manuscript sources, has been made to illustrate the arguments used in this debate and the manner in which solutions to some of the problems were gradually worked out over a period of more than fifty years. By 1813, after much trial and error, the outline of the political, administrative and economic links which were to bind India to Britain for much of the nineteenth century are already visible.