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War, Culture and Society in Early Modern South Asia, 1740-1849
This book argues that the role of the British East India Company in transforming warfare in South Asia has been overestimated. Although it agrees with conventional wisdom that, before the British, the nature of Indian society made it difficult for central authorities to establish themselves fully and develop a monopoly over armed force, the book argues that changes to warfare in South Asia were more gradual, and the result of more complicated socio-economic forces than has been hitherto acknowledged.
The book covers the period from 1740, when the British first became a major power broker in south India, to 1849, when the British eliminated the last substantial indigenous kingdom in the sub-continent. Placing South Asian military history in a global, comparative context, it examines military innovations; armies and how they conducted themselves; navies and naval warfare; major Indian military powers - such as the Mysore and Khalsa kingdoms, the Maratha confederacy - and the British, explaining why they succeeded.
eBook
The black hole of empire
When Siraj, the ruler of Bengal, overran the British settlement of Calcutta in 1756, he allegedly jailed 146 European prisoners overnight in a cramped prison. Of the group, 123 died of suffocation. While this episode was never independently confirmed, the story of \"the black hole of Calcutta\" was widely circulated and seen by the British public as an atrocity committed by savage colonial subjects.The Black Hole of Empirefollows the ever-changing representations of this historical event and founding myth of the British Empire in India, from the eighteenth century to the present. Partha Chatterjee explores how a supposed tragedy paved the ideological foundations for the \"civilizing\" force of British imperial rule and territorial control in India.
Chatterjee takes a close look at the justifications of modern empire by liberal thinkers, international lawyers, and conservative traditionalists, and examines the intellectual and political responses of the colonized, including those of Bengali nationalists. The two sides of empire's entwined history are brought together in the story of the Black Hole memorial: set up in Calcutta in 1760, demolished in 1821, restored by Lord Curzon in 1902, and removed in 1940 to a neglected churchyard. Challenging conventional truisms of imperial history, nationalist scholarship, and liberal visions of globalization, Chatterjee argues that empire is a necessary and continuing part of the history of the modern state.
Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.
eBook
The coins of the English East India Company : presidency series
This catalogue presents a list of all coins known to have been issued by the East India Company for use in their Presidencies of Bengal, Bombay and Madras. Each of the main sections covers the coins of one Presidency with chapters on the coins issued from the main mint in the area ? Calcutta, Bombay or Madras ? as well as chapters on coins issued from local and transitional mints, most of which were not covered in Major Pridmore?s seminal work on the subject.
Book
Rivalry for trade in tea and textiles : the English and Dutch East India Companies (1700-1800)
The rivalry for trade in tea and textiles between the English and Dutch East India companies is very much a global history. This trade is strongly connected to emblematic events such as the opening of Western trade with China, the Boston Tea Party, the establishment of British Empire in Bengal and the Industrial Revolution.
eBook
The anarchy : the relentless rise of the East India Company
In August 1765 the East India Company defeated and captured the young Mughal emperor and forced him to set up in his richest provinces a new government run by English traders who collected taxes through means of a vast and ruthless private army.0The creation of this new government marked the moment that the East India Company ceased to be a conventional international trading corporation, dealing in silks and spices, and became something much more unusual: an aggressive colonial power in the guise of a multinational business. In less than half a century it had trained up a private security force of around 260,000 men - twice the size of the British army - and had subdued an entire subcontinent, conquering first Bengal and finally, in 1803, the Mughal capital of Delhi itself. The Company's reach stretched relentlessly until almost all of India south of the Himalayas was effectively ruled from a boardroom in London. 0'The Anarchy' tells the remarkable story of how one of the world's most magnificent empires disintegrated and came to be replaced by a dangerously unregulated private company, based thousands of miles overseas and answerable only to its shareholders. In his most ambitious and riveting book to date, William Dalrymple tells the story of the East India Company as it has never been told before, unfolding a timely cautionary tale of the first global corporate power.
The scandal of empire : India and the creation of imperial Britain
Many have told of the East India Company's extraordinary excesses in eighteenth-century India, of the plunder that made its directors fabulously wealthy and able to buy British land and titles, but this is only a fraction of the story. When one of these men—Warren Hastings—was put on trial by Edmund Burke, it brought the Company's exploits to the attention of the public. Through the trial and after, the British government transformed public understanding of the Company's corrupt actions by creating an image of a vulnerable India that needed British assistance. Intrusive behavior was recast as a civilizing mission. In this fascinating, and devastating, account of the scandal that laid the foundation of the British Empire, Nicholas Dirks explains how this substitution of imperial authority for Company rule helped erase the dirty origins of empire and justify the British presence in India.
The Scandal of Empire reveals that the conquests and exploitations of the East India Company were critical to England's development in the eighteenth century and beyond. We see how mercantile trade was inextricably linked with imperial venture and scandalous excess and how these three things provided the ideological basis for far-flung British expansion. In this powerfully written and trenchant critique, Dirks shows how the empire projected its own scandalous behavior onto India itself. By returning to the moment when the scandal of empire became acceptable we gain a new understanding of the modern culture of the colonizer and the colonized and the manifold implications for Britain, India, and the world.
eBook
Goddess of fire
Moorti--widowed at just 17 and about to be burned on her husband's funeral pyre--is saved from the fire by a mysterious Englishman. Taken to safety and given employment by her saviour Job Charnock, Moorti--renamed Maria--must embrace her new life among the English traders. But the intelligent and talented Maria is not content to be a servant for the rest of her life, and seizes the opportunity to learn English. This, she hopes, will bring her closer to the kind and gentle Job.
Book
The Chaplains of the East India Company, 1601-1858
The East India Company's merchants were called Adventurers because they ventured their money in the risky markets of the Spice Islands and the fabulously wealthy Mughal Empire. In another sense also, the Company's entire 250 years were an adventure, exciting and dangerous, and creating over time, by violence and corruption, an empire. Contrary to the common view, the Company always claimed a Christian identity, hence the chaplains, on their voyages and in their trading 'factories' and garrisons, to guard the morals and morale of their operations. This the chaplains did with varying conviction and success. Forbear of the multinational of today, the Company continues to fascinate, attracting a vast amount of study worldwide as an economic and political phenomenon, an instrument of development, patron of art, and locus of attention in the new-imperial and postcolonial literature. Virtually unnoticed hitherto alongside the seafarers, merchant-adventurers, soldiers and imperialists, and their Indian collaborators, was a succession of educated, mostly young men with a tricky assignment and a distinct angle on all that took place: the chaplains.
eBook