The Emergence of British Power in India, 1600-1784

The Emergence of British Power in India, 1600-1784 PDF Author: G. J. Bryant
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 1843838540
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
Outlines the East India's Company's infiltration of India from its inception to the late eighteenth century.

The Emergence of British Power in India, 1600-1784

The Emergence of British Power in India, 1600-1784 PDF Author: G. J. Bryant
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 1843838540
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
Outlines the East India's Company's infiltration of India from its inception to the late eighteenth century.

The Chaos of Empire

The Chaos of Empire PDF Author: Jon Wilson
Publisher: Public Affairs
ISBN: 1610392930
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 586

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Book Description
From the moment in the 1680s that the East India Company began to trade with the Mughal rulers of the port cities of Surat, Madras, Bombay, Calcutta, and Chittagong, the story of the Indian subcontinent was changed forever. Before its dissolution in 1857, the officers of the East India Company had under their command more than a quarter of a million troops, and functioned not as a trading partner but a quasi-imperial government whose monopolistic habits and trade preferments included the tax on tea that led directly to the American Revolution. On its dissolution the Times reported: "It accomplished a work such as in the whole history of the human race no other company ever attempted and as such is ever likely to attempt in the years to come." This was meant as a compliment, but it concealed a much more brutal truth. From the famine of 1770 in which one third of the people living in the state of Bengal perished to the Anglo-Mughal wars and the later brutal repression of the Anglo-Afghan Wars, the story of the British in India was one of conflict and divide-and-rule, relentlessly applied from the relative security of the world’s most powerful naval vessels and the forts they supplied. Interspersed between the major wars were numerous minor conflicts, most lost to popular histories, which underscore the continual violence of the imperial project. In The Chaos of Empire, Jon Wilson uses the everyday lives of administrators, soldiers and subjects, British and Indian, to lift the veil of empire to show how British rule really worked. Far from the orderly Raj that its officials sought to portray, British rule in conquered India was chaotic and paranoid, and led to a succession of unstable states in South Asia and across the world. Most importantly, empire in India created a huge gap between image and reality, enabling a small number of people--a social and political elite--to project power across the world. Among its legacies were continual cycles of hubristic state enterprise followed by massive failure--up to and including the neo-imperial adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq now. Long after the end of empire, The Chaos of Empire argues that we still try to live by the myths created by the Raj. At a time when Prime Minister Narendra Modi is arguing that Britain should pay restitution for the damage done to the Indian subcontinent under British rule, this comprehensive, dynamic, and fierce history of Britain’s rule is timely, provocative, and immensely readable.

Rise and Progress of the British Power in India. History of the Rise and Progress of British Power in India ... Second edition

Rise and Progress of the British Power in India. History of the Rise and Progress of British Power in India ... Second edition PDF Author: Peter Auber
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 760

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Britain's Maritime Empire

Britain's Maritime Empire PDF Author: John McAleer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107100720
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Analyses the critical role played by the maritime gateway to Asia around the Cape of Good Hope in the development of the British Empire. Focusing on a region that connected the Atlantic and Indian oceans at the centre of a vital maritime chain linking Europe with Asia, the book re-examines and reappraises Britain's oceanic empire.

How the East Was Won

How the East Was Won PDF Author: Andrew Phillips
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009064193
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 662

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Book Description
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 World the Plague Made

The World the Plague Made PDF Author: James Belich
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691219168
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 640

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Book Description
A groundbreaking history of how the Black Death unleashed revolutionary change across the medieval world and ushered in the modern age In 1346, a catastrophic plague beset Europe and its neighbours. The Black Death was a human tragedy that abruptly halved entire populations and caused untold suffering, but it also brought about a cultural and economic renewal on a scale never before witnessed. The World the Plague Made is a panoramic history of how the bubonic plague revolutionized labour, trade, and technology and set the stage for Europe’s global expansion. James Belich takes readers across centuries and continents to shed new light on one of history’s greatest paradoxes. Why did Europe’s dramatic rise begin in the wake of the Black Death? Belich shows how plague doubled the per capita endowment of everything even as it decimated the population. Many more people had disposable incomes. Demand grew for silks, sugar, spices, furs, gold, and slaves. Europe expanded to satisfy that demand—and plague provided the means. Labour scarcity drove more use of waterpower, wind power, and gunpowder. Technologies like water-powered blast furnaces, heavily gunned galleons, and musketry were fast-tracked by plague. A new “crew culture” of “disposable males” emerged to man the guns and galleons. Setting the rise of Western Europe in global context, Belich demonstrates how the mighty empires of the Middle East and Russia also flourished after the plague, and how European expansion was deeply entangled with the Chinese and other peoples throughout the world.

The Insecurity State

The Insecurity State PDF Author: Mark Condos
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108667651
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
In this provocative new work, Mark Condos explores the 'dark underside' of the ideologies that sustained British rule in India. Using Punjab as a case study, he argues that India's colonial overlords were obsessively fearful, and plagued by an unreasoning belief in their own vulnerability as rulers. These enduring anxieties precipitated, and justified, an all too frequent recourse to violence, joined with an insistence on untrammelled power placed in the hands of the executive. Examining how the British colonial experience was shaped by a chronic sense of unease, anxiety, and insecurity, this is a timely intervention in debates about the contested project of colonial state-building, the oppressive and violent practices of colonial rule, the nature of imperial sovereignty, law, and policing and the postcolonial legacies of empire.

Plotting Power

Plotting Power PDF Author: Jeremy Black
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253026792
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
An examination of strategy in war and international relations that links military ideas and practice, political concepts, diplomacy, and geopolitics. Military strategy takes place as much on broad national and international stages as on battlefields. In a brilliant reimagining of the impetus and scope of eighteenth-century warfare, historian Jeremy Black takes us far and wide, from the battlefields and global maneuvers in North America and Europe to the military machinations and plotting of such Asian powers as China, Japan, Burma, Vietnam, and Siam. Europeans coined the term “strategy” only two centuries ago, but strategy as a concept has been practiced globally throughout history. Taking issue with traditional military historians, Black argues persuasively that strategy was as much political as battlefield tactics and that plotting power did not always involve outright warfare but also global considerations of alliance building, trade agreements, and intimidation. “This is both an overview of eighteenth-century warfare and an interpretation of how war was made; a polemical contribution to a debate on the nature of strategy; and a contribution to global history.” —Alan Forrest, author of Napoleon: Life, Legacy, and Image: A Biography “A refreshing new look at how meanings behind these terms [strategy and strategic culture] were understood and employed in the eighteenth century. With his vast knowledge and insights of the period, he is able to take us on a wide-ranging exploration that provides stimulating food for thought for historians of all periods.” —Richard Harding, author of The Emergence of Britain’s Global Naval Supremacy: The War of 1739-1748

The East India Company, 1600–1858

The East India Company, 1600–1858 PDF Author: Ian Barrow
Publisher: Hackett Publishing
ISBN: 1624665985
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
In existence for 258 years, the English East India Company ran a complex, highly integrated global trading network. It supplied the tea for the Boston Tea Party, the cotton textiles used to purchase slaves in Africa, and the opium for China’s nineteenth-century addiction. In India it expanded from a few small coastal settlements to govern territories that far exceeded the British Isles in extent and population. It minted coins in its name, established law courts and prisons, and prosecuted wars with one of the world’s largest armies. Over time, the Company developed a pronounced and aggressive colonialism that laid the foundation for Britain’s Eastern empire. A study of the Company, therefore, is a study of the rise of the modern world. In clear, engaging prose, Ian Barrow sets the rise and fall of the Company into political, economic, and cultural contexts and explains how and why the Company was transformed from a maritime trading entity into a territorial colonial state. Excerpts from eighteen primary documents illustrate the main themes and ideas discussed in the text. Maps, illustrations, a glossary, and a chronology are also included.

Rise and Progress of the British Power in India. History of the Rise and Progress of British Power in India ... Second Edition

Rise and Progress of the British Power in India. History of the Rise and Progress of British Power in India ... Second Edition PDF Author: Peter Auber
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description