What was life like for the British men, women, and children who lived in late imperial India while serving the Raj? Empire Families treats the Raj as a family affair and examines how, and why, many remained linked with India over several generations.Due to the fact that India was never meant for permanent European settlement, many families developed deep-rooted ties with India while never formally emigrating. Their lives were dominated by long periods of residence abroad punctuated by repeated travels between Britain and India: childhood overseas followed by separation from parents and education in Britain; adult returns to India through careers or marriage; furloughs, and ultimately retirement, in Britain. As a result, many Britonsneither felt themselves to be rooted in India, nor felt completely at home when back in Britain. Their permanent impermanence led to the creation of distinct social realities and cultural identities.Empire Families sets out to recreate this society by looking at a series of families, their lives in India, and their travels back to Britain. Focusing for the first time on the experiences of parents and children alike, and including the Beveridge, Butler, Orwell, and Kipling families, Elizabeth Buettner uncovers the meanings of growing up in the Raj and an itinerant imperial lifestyle.

Picking up on Edward Said's claim that the historical experience of empire is common to both the colonizer and the colonized, Peter van der Veer takes the case of religion to examine the mutual impact of Britain's colonization of India on Indian and British culture. He shows that national culture in both India and Britain developed in relation to their shared colonial experience and that notions of religion and secularity were crucial in imagining the modern nation in both countries. In the process, van der Veer chronicles how these notions developed in the second half of the nineteenth century in relation to gender, race, language, spirituality, and science. Avoiding the pitfalls of both world systems theory and national historiography, this book problematizes oppositions between modern and traditional, secular and religious, progressive and reactionary. It shows that what often are assumed to be opposites are, in fact, profoundly entangled. In doing so, it upsets the convenient fiction that India is the land of eternal religion, existing outside of history, while Britain is the epitome of modern secularity and an agent of history. Van der Veer also accounts for the continuing role of religion in British culture and the strong part religion has played in the development of Indian civil society. This masterly work of scholarship brings into view the effects of the very close encounter between India and Britain--an intimate encounter that defined the character of both nations.

Many have told of the East India Company’s extraordinary excesses in eighteenth-century India, of the plunder that made its directors fabulously wealthy and able to buy British land and titles, but this is only a fraction of the story. When one of these men—Warren Hastings—was put on trial by Edmund Burke, it brought the Company’s exploits to the attention of the public. Through the trial and after, the British government transformed public understanding of the Company’s corrupt actions by creating an image of a vulnerable India that needed British assistance. Intrusive behavior was recast as a civilizing mission. In this fascinating, and devastating, account of the scandal that laid the foundation of the British Empire, Nicholas Dirks explains how this substitution of imperial authority for Company rule helped erase the dirty origins of empire and justify the British presence in India. The Scandal of Empire reveals that the conquests and exploitations of the East India Company were critical to England’s development in the eighteenth century and beyond. We see how mercantile trade was inextricably linked with imperial venture and scandalous excess and how these three things provided the ideological basis for far-flung British expansion. In this powerfully written and trenchant critique, Dirks shows how the empire projected its own scandalous behavior onto India itself. By returning to the moment when the scandal of empire became acceptable we gain a new understanding of the modern culture of the colonizer and the colonized and the manifold implications for Britain, India, and the world.

What was imperial honor and how did it sustain the British Raj? If "No man may harm me with impunity" was an ancient theme of the European aristocracy, British imperialists of almost all classes in India possessed a similar vision of themselves as overlords belonging to an honorable race, so that ideals of honor condoned and sanctified their rituals, connecting them with status, power, and authority. Honor, most broadly, legitimated imperial rule, since imperialists ostensibly kept India safe from outside threats. Yet at the individual level, honor kept the "white herd" together, providing the protocols and etiquette for the imperialist, who had to conform to the strict notions of proper and improper behavior in a society that was always obsessed with maintaining its dominance over India and Indians.Examining imperial society through the prism of honor therefore opens up a new methodology for the study of British India.

'An exceptional account.' Prospect 'Enlightening.' Spectator For the first time in millennia we live without formal empires. But that doesn't mean we don't feel their presence rumbling through history. The Great Imperial Hangover examines how the world's imperial legacies are still shaping the thorniest issues we face today. From Russia's incursions in the Ukraine to Brexit; from Trump's 'America-first' policy to China's forays into Africa; from Modi's India to the hotbed of the Middle East, Puri provides a bold new framework for understanding the world's complex rivalries and politics. Organised by region, and covering vital topics such as security, foreign policy, national politics and commerce, The Great Imperial Hangover combines gripping history and astute analysis to explain why the history of empire affects us all in profound ways.

This book looks at the relationship between culture and power expressed in architectural forms employed by the British in India. These buildings reflect the choices made by the British in their politics as imperial rulers.

With the advent of the steamship, repeated outbreaks of cholera marked oceanic pilgrimages to Mecca as a dangerous form of travel and a vehicle for the globalization of epidemic diseases. European, especially British Indian, officials also feared that lengthy sojourns in Arabia might expose their Muslim subjects to radicalizing influences from anticolonial dissidents and pan-Islamic activists. European colonial empires’ newfound ability to set the terms of hajj travel not only affected the lives of millions of pilgrims but also dramatically challenged the Ottoman Empire, the world’s only remaining Muslim imperial power. Michael Christopher Low analyzes the late Ottoman hajj and Hijaz region as transimperial spaces, reshaped by the competing forces of Istanbul’s project of frontier modernization and the extraterritorial reach of British India’s steamship empire in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea. Imperial Mecca recasts Ottoman Arabia as a distant, unstable semiautonomous frontier that Istanbul struggled to modernize and defend against the onslaught of colonial steamship mobility. As it turned out, steamships carried not just pilgrims, passports, and microbes, but the specter of legal imperialism and colonial intervention. Over the course of roughly a half century from the 1850s through World War I, British India’s fear of the hajj as a vector of anticolonial subversion gradually gave way to an increasingly sophisticated administrative, legal, and medical protectorate over the steamship hajj, threatening to eclipse the Ottoman state and Caliphate’s prized legitimizing claim as protector of Islam’s most holy places. Drawing on a wide range of Ottoman and British archival sources, this book sheds new light on the transimperial and global histories traversed along the pilgrimage to Mecca.

Inglorious Empire' tells the real story of the British in India from the arrival of the East India Company to the end of the Raj, revealing how Britain's rise was built upon its plunder of India. In the eighteenth century, India's share of the world economy was as large as Europe's. By 1947, after two centuries of British rule, it had decreased six-fold. Beyond conquest and deception, the Empire blew rebels from cannon, massacred unarmed protesters, entrenched institutionalised racism, and caused millions to die from starvation. British imperialism justified itself as enlightened despotism for the benefit of the governed, but Shashi Tharoor takes on and demolishes this position, demonstrating how every supposed imperial "gift" - from the railways to the rule of law -was designed in Britain's interests alone. He goes on to show how Britain's Industrial Revolution was founded on India's deindustrialisation, and the destruction of its textile industry.

"Imperial Connections challenges the Eurocentrism implicit in many accounts of modern European empires. Focusing on the British empire when it was at its zenith, Metcalf analyzes the pivotal role the Raj played in the running of the empire in regions as far flung from one another as, say, Egypt, Uganda, Natal, and the Malay peninsula. This innovative book is a real tour de force from a respected and versatile historian of India."—Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference "As he has done regularly throughout his career, Thomas Metcalf has once again refreshed the study of British imperial history with a bold new perspective. Imperial Connections puts South Asians—soldiers, policemen and labourers—right at the heart of his study."—C.A. Bayly, Cambridge University, author of The Birth of the Modern World "This is a distinctly original study which re-centers colonial power in provocative ways. Metcalf asks a simple question—why were Indians so persistently to be found elsewhere in the British empire, and in such significant numbers? Then elegantly offers answers that force us to re-think the operations of imperial power in critical ways. Wide-ranging, elegantly written, and meticulously researched, Metcalf's is an important and a persuasive study."—Philippa Levine, author of Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire, and forthcoming, The British Empire, Sunrise to Sunset

The Business of Empire assesses the domestic impact of British imperial expansion by analysing what happened in Britain following the East India Company's acquisition of a vast territorial empire in South Asia. Drawing on a mass of hitherto unused material contained in the company's administrative and financial records, the book offers a reconstruction of the inner workings of the company as it made the remarkable transition from business to empire during the late-eighteenth century. H. V. Bowen profiles the company's stockholders and directors and examines how those in London adapted their methods, working practices, and policies to changing circumstances in India. He also explores the company's multifarious interactions with the domestic economy and society, and sheds important new light on its substantial contributions to the development of Britain's imperial state, public finances, military strength, trade and industry. This book will appeal to all those interested in imperial, economic and business history.