By John Keay
The 1st single-volume heritage of India because the Nineteen Fifties, combining narrative velocity and ability with social, monetary and cultural research. 5 millennia of the sub-continent's heritage are interpreted by way of one in all our most interesting writers on India and the a ways East. This variation doesn't comprise illustrations.
Older, richer and extra specific than nearly the other, India's tradition furnishes all that the historian may well want for within the means of continuity and variety. The peoples of the Indian subcontinent, whereas sharing a standard background and tradition, aren't now, and not were, a unmarried unitary country; the e-book contains Pakistan and Bangladesh, in addition to different embryonic state states just like the Sikh Punjab, Muslim Kashmir and Assam.
Above all, the colonial period is obvious within the total context of Indian heritage, and the legacy of the 1947 partition is tested from the perspective of at the present time.
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Additional info for India: A History (Revised Edition)
Sample text
From these small beginnings grew the great bastion of British power in south-east India—Madras, one of the most important cities of British India. Shortly after the acquisition of Fort St George, events in England put the Company’s activities in India into a minor key, when the growing conflict between Charles I and Parliament erupted in 1642 into Civil War and Revolution. Although under Cromwell’s leadership the Commonwealth government in England pursued aggressive and vigorous colonial and commercial policies during the 1650s, they were chiefly aimed at expansion in the West Indies and North America—the much-vaunted ‘Western design’.
At length our gallant cavalry Scarce fifteen hundred men, The flower of Britain’s chivalry Prepare to charge again. That gallant chieftain Colonel White, These heroes bravely led; They sought the hottest of the fight, Their path was strewn with dead. ’Twas plainly marked for all to see Where charged our British cavalry.
3 While the British East India Company was asserting its control over indigenous people and pushing aside its European rivals, it also suffered a crisis of conscience over its standards of administration. The basic problem was how to control the widespread corruption of Company officials. When faced, as they were from the outset, with a system of chronic bribery and corruption in India, the servants of the Company had frequently used the same methods in their dealings with Indians. ’ These problems had been brought dramatically to the public’s attention during Warren Hastings’s Governorship of India, in 1773–85.