You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
For centuries the Bay of Bengal served as a maritime highway between India and China, and as a battleground for European empires, while being shaped by monsoons and human migration. Integrating environmental history and mining a wealth of sources, Sunil S. Amrith offers insights to the many challenges facing Asia in the decades ahead.
The aim of Bengal: The British Bridgehead is to explain how, in the eighteenth century, Britain established her rule in eastern India, the first part of the subcontinent to be incorporated into the British Empire. Though the British were not in firm control of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa until 1765, to illustrate the circumstances in which they gained power and elucidate the Indian inheritance that so powerfully shaped the early years of their rule, professor Marshall begins his analysis around 1740 with the reign of Alivardi Khan, the last effective Mughal ruler of eastern India. He then explores the social, cultural and economic changes that followed the imposition of foreign rule and seeks to assess the consequences for the peoples of the region; emphasis is given throughout as much to continuities rooted deep in the history of Bengal as to the more obvious effects of British domination. The volume closes in the 1820s when, with British rule firmly established, a new pattern of cultural and economic relations was developing between Britain and eastern India.
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.
Examines the interconnected events including World War II, India's struggle for independence, and a period of acute scarcity that lead to mass starvation in colonial Bengal.
An innovative analysis of the experience of Bengali Muslims on the Indian side of the India-Bangladesh border.
Edward John Thompson -- novelist, poet, journalist, and historian of India -- was a liberal advocate for Indian culture and political self-determination at a time when Indian affairs were of little general interest in England. As a friend of Nehru, Gandhi, and other Congress Party leaders, Thompson had contacts that many English officials did not have and did not know how to get. Thus, he was an excellent channel for interpreting India to England and England to India.