Before the myth took over, there was the work. Long before Hollywood dressed the cowboy in cinematic glory and romanticized his silhouette against a painted sunset, there was a man on horseback doing one of the most physically demanding, technically complex, and relentlessly unforgiving jobs the American frontier ever produced. This remarkable volume strips away every layer of legend and gets down to the raw, gritty, beautifully honest truth of what it actually meant to be a cowboy, not in...

This book tells the fascinating story of the war between England and China that delivered Hong Kong to the English, forced the imperial Chinese government to add four ports to Canton as places in which foreigners could live and trade, and rendered irreversible the process that for almost a century thereafter distinguished western relations with this quarter of the globe—the process that is loosely termed the "opening of China."Originally published by UNC Press in 1975, Peter Ward Fa...

This book tells the fascinating story of the war between England and China that delivered Hong Kong to the English, forced the imperial Chinese government to add four ports to Canton as places in which foreigners could live and trade, and rendered irreversible the process that for almost a century thereafter distinguished western relations with this quarter of the globe — the process that is loosely termed the “opening of China.”Originally published by UNC Press in 1975, Peter Ward ...

The last days of the Raj bring to mind Gandhi's nonviolence and Nehru's diplomacy. These associations obscure another reality: that an army of Indian men and women who tried to throw the British off the subcontinent. The Forgotten Army brings to life for the first time the story of how Subhas Chandra Bose, a charismatic Bengali, attempted to liberate India with an army of former British Indian soldiers -- the Indian National Army (INA). The story begins with the British Indian Army fightin...

‘A gripping read as well as an important one’ – Rana Mitter, The GuardianIn The Opium War, professor of Modern Chinese History and Literature Julia Lovell offers a compelling account of the causes and fallout of the Opium Wars.In October 1839, Britain entered the first Opium War with China. Its brutality notwithstanding, the conflict was also threaded with tragicomedy: with Victorian hypocrisy, bureaucratic fumbli...

A gripping account of China’s nineteenth-century Taiping Rebellion, one of the largest civil wars in history. Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom brims with unforgettable characters and vivid re-creations of massive and often gruesome battles—a sweeping yet intimate portrait of the conflict that shaped the fate of modern China.The story begins in the early 1850s, the waning years of the Qing dynasty, when word spread of a major revolution brewing in the provinces, led by a fail...

Little is known and much less has been written about the Malayan theatre of operations of SOE from 1942-45. In this, his second book, Ian Trenowden, working closely with the wartime commander of Force 136, Group B, has built up a surprisingly complete picture of those operations and traces the evolution of the local SOE headquarters from a single desk in London’s Baker Street to the independent Ceylon HQ which, by the end of the war had put a total of 400 British officers and other ranks i...

The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. The black sign, painted in white letters that hangs upon the gates, reads:Opens at NightfallCloses at DawnAs the sun disappears beyond the horizon, all over the tents small lights begin to flicker, as though the entirety of the circus is covered in particularly bright fireflies. When the tents are all aglow, sparkling against the night sk...

The stroke of midnight on 15 August 1947 liberated 400 million Indians from the British Empire. One of the defining moments of world history had been brought about by a tiny number of people, including Jawaharlal Nehru, the fiery prime minister-to-be; Gandhi, the mystical figure who enthralled a nation; and Louis and Edwina Mountbatten, the glamorous but unlikely couple who had been dispatched to get Britain out of India without delay. Within hours of the midnight chimes, however, the two ...

No other land has captured man's imagination quite like Tibet. Hidden away behind the highest mountains on earth, and ruled over by a mysterious God-king, it was for centuries a land forbidden to all outsiders.In this remarkable and ultimately tragic narrative, Peter Hopkirk recounts the forcible opening up of this medieval Buddhist kingdom by inquisitive Western travellers during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the race to reach Lhasa, Tibet's sacred capital.Th...

This edition does not include illustrations.Inspiration for the major film starring Hugh Bonneville, Gillian Anderson, Manish Dayal and Huma Qureshi and directed by Gurinder Chadha.Seventy years ago, at midnight on 14 August 1947, the Union Jack began its final journey down the flagstaff of Viceroy’s House, New Delhi. A fifth of humanity claimed their independence from the greatest empire history has ever seen – but the price of freedom was high, as a natio...

A dogged enemy of Hitler, resolute ally of the Americans, and inspiring leader through World War II, Winston Churchill is venerated as one of the truly great statesmen of the last century. But while he has been widely extolled for his achievements, parts of Churchill's record have gone woefully unexamined.As journalist Madhusree Mukerjee reveals, at the same time that Churchill brilliantly opposed the barbarism of the Nazis, he governed India with a fierce resolve to crush its freedom move...