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Justin Jones' book, Shi'a Islam in Colonial India: Religion, Community and Sectarianism (Cambridge University Press, 2012) is all about Lucknow, and c…
Presenting- and being granted an audience- at the court of a foreign potentate was the way to gain legitimacy, acceptance, and often, protection to be…
It was the last in a long line of 'Acts' designed to ensure better colonial governance for the Indian sub-continent. It was an Act which was vociferou…
In 1658, a Dutch East India Company merchant by the name of Philip Angel presented a gift manuscript to Company Director Carel Hartsinck. It was inten…
This is a book about horses. Donna Landry's Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture (The John Hopkins University Press, 2009) is …
Mark Twain called it "pious hypocrisies." President McKinley called it "civilizing and Christianizing." Both were referring to the U.S. annexation of …
Richard Blechynden came to Calcutta in 1782 as a twenty two year old, and stayed there for the rest of his life, working as a surveyor and architect. …
Nineteenth-century observers would say that the British Empire was an Islamic one; be that as it may, before Empire there was trade- and lots of it. N…
Konstantin von Kaufmann, Governor-General of Russian Turkestan from 1867 until his death in 1882, wanted to be buried in Tashkent if he died in office…
North East India is, as Marcus Franke's War and Nationalism in South Asia: The Indian State and the Nagas (Routledge, 2011) all too convincingly demon…
English common law is prevalent across large parts of the world; and all thanks to the British Empire. It was not just culture and commerce that came …
Horticulture is not an activity normally associated with Empire building. But Eugenia Herbert's book Flora's Empire: British Gardens in India (Philade…
'Traders to rulers' is an enduring caption insofar as the English East India Company is concerned. But were they ever just traders to start off with, …
Great Britain and Russia faced off across the Pamirs for much of the nineteenth century; their rivalries and animosities often obscuring underlying co…
For an empire supposedly founded on the back of trade, not much attention has been paid to how the finances of the British Empire were organized- or t…
Everyone knows that the late nineteenth-century Russian Empire was the largest land based empire around, and that it was growing yet- at fifty-five sq…
A book called Southeast Asia in World History (Oxford University Press, 2009) might seem on the face of it to be out of place on a blog about South As…
Hobson-Jobson was not just about administration and geopolitics- the language of Empire extended to its culinary endeavours as well. Thus chota hazri,…
The Greco-Roman world was the prism through which the British viewed their imperial efforts, and Mark Bradley's compendium Classics and Imperialism in…
The odds are that if you don't figure in an administration's records, you won't figure in the historical record. But what do you do to get into those …
As Ahmedabad, the chief city of Gujarat state in Western India, puts itself up as a contender for World Heritage status, Howard Spodek's lovely book, …
Bombay (Mumbai), India, is a city that has never lacked chroniclers from Rudyard Kipling to Salman Rushdie to Suketu Mehta, bards of pluralism have wr…
The Dutch broke the Portuguese commercial and colonizing monopoly in the East in 1595; the seal might have been said to have been set on this triumph …
Nugroho Notosusanto (1930-1985) never pursued a military career; but all the same he did his bit for the Indonesian armed forces. He was co-opted into…