For thirty years in India at the cusp of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Henry Thomas Colebrooke was an administrator and scholar with the East India Company. The Making of Western Indology explains and evaluates Colebrooke’s role as the founder of modern Indology.The book discusses how Colebrooke embodies the significant passage from the speculative yearnings attendant on eighteenth-century colonial expansion, to the professional, transnational ethos of nineteenth-century...

This collection of essays, two of which appear in print for the first time, documents the late Holden Furber’s discovery that private ventures, most manifestly deployed in the ’country trade’ between Asian ports, played a major role in the European expansion in India before the age of empire. Furber vividly describes how individual entrepreneurs used their positions with East India Companies to build personal fortunes, and how these private endeavours, for which the English East India Comp...

A "highly enjoyable" account of six men, and one woman, who journeyed into uncharted and treacherous African terrain to find the source of the White Nile ( The Washington Post).Nothing obsessed explorers of the mid-nineteenth century more than the quest to discover the source of the White Nile. It was the planet's most elusive secret, the prize coveted above all others. Between 1856 and 1876, six larger-than-life men and one extraordinary woman accepted th...

A history of the English East India company.During 200 years the East India Company grew from a loose association of Elizabethan tradesmen into "the grandest society of merchants in the universe". As a commercial enterprise it came to control half the world's trade and as a political entity it administered an embryonic empire. Without it there would have been no British India and no British Empire. In a tapestry ranging from Southern Africa to north-west America, and from the reign...

A magisterial history of resistance to the rising of the British empireAs the call for a new understanding of our national history grows louder, Britain’s Empire turns the received imperial story on its head. Richard Gott recounts the long-overlooked narrative of resisters, revolutionaries and revolters who stood up to the might of the Empire. In a story of almost continuous colonialist violence, Britain’s crimes unspool from the beginning of the eighteent...

What are the 50 key events you need to understand to grasp British history?If you could choose the 50 things that define British history, events of significance not only in themselves, but in their importance to wider themes running through our past, what would they be? Hugh Williams has made that selection, and the result is a fascinating overview of Britain’s past.He refines British history into a series of key themes that represent a crucial strand in our history, and pi...

Follows the trade winds, the trade routes, and the port cities across the East Indies and the Orient uncovering the high finance, piracy, greed, ambition, double dealing, and exploitation. Driven  by the search for spices, silks, gold, silver, porcelains and other oriental goods the Portuguese trading monopoly was challenged by the Dutch East India Company and then the English East India Company, the worlds first joint stock and multi-national trading companies. The struggle for supremacy bet...

This "fresh and compelling" study sheds light on the dramatic military, political, and cultural forces that led Greece to liberation in the 19th century ( Wall Street Journal).In The Greek War of Independence, Oxford scholar David Brewer presents a vividly detailed and comprehensive study of one of history's most heroic and bloody struggles for independence. This was the revolution of the Romantic Age, inspiring painters, poets, and patriots the wo...

This book provides an easy to understand overview of British History in 50 Events.Inside you will learn about…- The Foundation of London- The Great Viking Invasion- The Battle of Hastings- The Black Death- The Battle of Waterloo- The Last Public HangingAnd much more!

The unlikely beginnings of the East India Company—from Tudor origins and rivalry with the superior Dutch—to laying the groundwork for future British expansionThe East India Company was the largest commercial enterprise in British history, yet its roots in Tudor England are often overlooked. The Tudor revolution in commerce led ambitious merchants to search for new forms of investment, not least in risky overseas enterprises—and for these “adventurers” the most prof...

Twice since the Norman Conquest has the little country of England been the center of an empire: once when Henry II of England was at the same time master of half France; and now again when the Union Jack or the red ensign flies over cities and continents of which Henry Plantagenet never dreamed. Yet to use the same word to describe both of these empires seems unfortunate. Indeed, the use of the word "empire" is questionable in either case, – only to be sanctioned because we seem to have no...

A gripping and thought-provoking account of the reign of King James I, who united Britain and made England the global power we know today.The British monarchy of today descends directly from one leader: King James I, whose huge—and much overlooked—influence launched England as a major international trade power, established the King James Bible, and united the royal families of Scotland and England under one house and one monarch.Along with his wife, Anna of...