William Dalrymple and Anita Anand’s Empire podcast series has been transformative in the understanding it has generated and the audiences it has reached in the last year (1 million plus in January 2023 alone).
The Anarchy is one of the core books of Dalrymple’s extraordinary research and scholarship which has changed our understanding of the generation and development of the British Raj in India and which brings into view more clearly and accurately than ever before, the toxic legacy of the East India Company and its company state apparatus.
Yet unlike some other authors, Dalrymple is content to let the facts speak for themselves and does not idealise the world of the Mughals and native princes. In an era of propaganda and revisionism, The Anarchy utilises the empirical data of the Enlightenment at magnificent scale to expose some of the savagery—on all sides—of the Enlightenment era.
THE TOP 5 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S BEST BOOKS OF 2019
THE TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR
FINALIST FOR THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE 2020
LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2019
A FINANCIAL TIMES, OBSERVER, DAILY TELEGRAPH, WALL STREET JOURNAL AND TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR
'Dalrymple is a superb historian with a visceral understanding of India ... A book of beauty' - Gerard DeGroot, The Times
In August 1765 the East India Company defeated the young Mughal emperor and forced him to establish a new administration in his richest provinces. Run by English…
Andrew Mackillop’s Human Capital and Empire is in the words of the song ‘simply the best’ history of the relationship of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales to the East India Company and its patronage and financial networks.
Based on hugely ambitious primary research, Mackillop provides a detailed, stylish, and inspirational read that tracks to ground the sources for the transformative injections of capital into the Scottish and other economies from India in 1775-1820. These helped to make Scotland—broadly speaking—as well off as England and paved the way for the technology investments in steam and speed which helped to quadruple world trade in the nineteenth century. This is some book.
Human capital and empire compares the role of Scots, Irish and Welsh within the English East India Company between c. 1690 and c. 1820. It focuses on why the three groups developed such distinctive and different profiles within the corporation and its wider colonial activities in Asia. Besides contributing to the national histories of Scotland, Ireland and Wales, it uses these societies to ask how 'poorer' regions of Europe participated in global empire. The chapters cover involvement in the Company's administrative, military, medical, maritime and private trade activities. The analysis conceives of sojourning to Asia as a cycle of human…
Since the collapse of the USSR and Yugoslavia more than thirty years ago, I have repeatedly been surprised and even shocked by the ignorance of history shown by policymakers and politicians, an ignorance which has its most recent terrible manifestation in the almost complete failure to anticipate the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The Vanquished will in a few hours make its reader better informed than many of those paid to govern her. It demonstrates how the problems of Syria and the Levant (which can be read about in more detail in James Barr’s A Line in the Sand) and central and Eastern Europe remain a legacy of the First World War and the failure of equally ignorant policymakers a century ago to grasp the consequences of partitioning the lands of imperial Austria and the Ottomans in the crude manner they chose.
Scotland is one of the oldest nations in the world, yet by some it is hardly counted as a nation at all. Neither a colony of England's nor a fully equal partner in the British Union, Scotland’s history has been conceived as fringe to a larger tale taking place south of the border. But the story of Scotland is one of innovation, exploration, resistance – and global consequence.
In this wide-ranging, deeply researched account Murray Pittock examines the place of Scotland in the world. Pittock explores Scotland and Empire, the rise of nationalism, and the pressures on the country from an increasingly monolithic understanding of ‘Britishness’. From the Thirty Years’ War to Jacobite rebellions and today’s ongoing independence debates, Scotland and its diaspora has undergone profound changes.
