General Charles James Napier was sent to confront the tens of thousands of Chartist protestors marching through the cities of the North of England in the late 1830s. A well-known leftist who agreed with the Chartist demands for democracy, Napier managed to keep the peace. In South Asia, the same man would later provoke a war and conquer Sind. In this first-ever scholarly biography of Napier, Edward Beasley asks how the conventional depictions of the man as a peacemaker in England and a warmonger in Asia can be reconciled. Employing deep archival research and close readings of Napier's published books (ignored by prior scholars), this well-written volume demonstrates that Napier was a liberal imperialist who believed that if freedom was right for the people of England it was right for the people of Sind -- even if "freedom" had to be imposed by military force. Napier also confronted the messy aftermath of Western conquest, carrying out nation-building with mixed success, trying to end the honour killing of women, and eventually discovering the limits of imperial interference.

The past quarter-century has seen a number of biographies and anthologies on women travelers but to date there has been little comprehensive reference work done on the travelers themselves. Some of the women were eccentric, many were very adventurous, some were in search of a different world... British women make up the largest portion of the book's focus--these particular adventurers being backed in many cases by family money, scientific inquiry, and the ready availability of the British seafaring tradition. Entries include the woman's family background, her educational history, and a summary of her world travels, with in many cases evocative extracts from their writings (many are literary gems).

From the mid-eighteenth century onwards, British women started traveling in any numbers to the East Indies, mostly to accompany husbands, brothers or fathers. Very little about them is recorded from the earlier years, about the remarkable journeys that they made and what drove them to travel those huge distances. Some kept journals, others wrote letters, and for the first time Patrick Wheeler tells their story in this fascinating and colorful history, exploring the little-known lives of these women and their experiences of life in India before the Raj.With a perceptive approach, Ribbons Among the Rajahs considers all aspects of women's lives in India, from the original discomfort of traversing the globe and the complexities of arrival through to creating a home in a tight-knight settlement community. It considers, too, the effects of the subservience of women to the needs of men and argues for the greater fusion of European cultures that existed prior to imperial times.

The practice of karo kari allows family, especially fathers, brothers and sons, to take the lives of their daughters, sisters and mothers if they are accused of adultery. This volume examines the central position of karo kari in the social, political and juridical structures in Upper Sindh, Pakistan. Drawing connections between local contests over marriage and resources, Nafisa Shah unearths deep historical processes and power relations. In particular, she explores how the state justice system and informal mediations inform each other in state responses to karo kari, and how modern law is implicated in this seemingly ancient cultural practice.

This book provides readers with a vivid picture of how South Asians were perceived by many in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century, as well as of life in Sindh under the Amirs, rulers of the region at that time. McMurdo's description indicates the bias and prejudice of an imperialist viewpoint and the political ramifi cations of such perceptions. At the time of Charles Napier's conquest of Sindh in 1843, the British government launched an adverse propaganda campaign aimed at depicting the Amirs as being incapable of looking aft er their own territories. This account can be counted as a part of this campaign. The book refl ects the broad political canvas of that time and prepares the backdrop for the eventual conquest of Sindh.

"Raza examines for the first time the whole body of women's published writing on India up to 1857, including the work of over eighty authors, many of them previously unknown. Her discussion of various aspects of women's roles and lives in India is enlivened with interesting and entertaining illustrations. The broad spectrum of authorship extends our understanding beyond the lives of the memsahibs and challenges some of the generalized assumptions about British women based on the later 'high noon' of empire. This volume will be of interest to general readers, literary historians, and scholars of women's studies and history, and colonial and imperial history."--BOOK JACKET.

This new series was established to collect various primary source materials selected from contemporary publications and historical documents related to phenomenon of the 'Yellow Peril', which represents an anxiety in Western society concerning the rise of Asia, particularly China and Japan, and the consequent decline of the West, racially, culturally, and militarily. The first series here examines the Yellow Peril as entertainment in Britain around the turn of the century and reprints nine popular novels all in first editions together with the reproduction of their original covers in colour.