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 of Elizabeth...
The first single-volume history of India since the 1950s, combining narrative pace and skill with social, economic and cultural analysis. Five millennia of the sub-continent’s history are interpreted by one of our finest writers on India and the Far East. This edition does not include illustrations.Older, richer and more distinctive than almost any other, India’s culture furnishes all that the historian could wish for in the way of continuity and diversity. The peoples of the Indian...
If British India had not been partitioned in 1947, its population would today be comfortably the world’s largest. At c1.5 billion, Midnight’s Descendants (the offspring of those affected by ‘the midnight hour’ Partition) already outnumber Europeans and Chinese; and they are growing faster than either. By 2020 they will constitute a quarter of the world’s entire population. As well as comprising the peoples of what is now called ‘South Asia’ (the preferred term for the partitioned subcontinent of...
An accessible, authoritative single-volume narrative history of China, from the earliest times to the present day, designed both to engage the general reader and to challenge the horizons of the China specialist.Most histories of China appear to have been written by sinologists for sinologists. As China rejoins and perhaps comes to dominate our world order, the need for an authoritative yet engaging history is universally acknowledged.Modelled on the author's own 'India: A History', 'China: A...
Two hundred years ago, India was seen as a place with little history and less culture.Today it is revered for a notable prehistory, a magnificent classical age and a cultural tradition unique in both character and continuity. How this extraordinary change in perception came about is the subject of this fascinating book.The story, here reconstructed for the first time, is one of painstaking scholarship primed by a succession of sensational discoveries. The excitement of unearthing a city twice as...
The story of both a dramatic journey retracing the historic voyage of France’s greatest 19th-century explorer up the mysterious Mekong river, and a portrait of the river and its peoples today.Any notion of sailing up the Mekong in homage to Francis Garnier has been unthinkable until now. From its delta in Vietnam up through Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Burma and on into China, the Mekong has been a no-go river, its turbulent waters fouled by ideological barriers as formidable as its natural...
A vivid description of one of the most ambitious scientific projects undertaken in the 19th century, and the men who undertook the measurement of the Himalayas and the mapping of the Indian subcontinent: William Lambton and George Everest.The graphic story of the measurement of a meridian, or longitudinal, arc extending from the tip of the Indian subcontinent to the mountains of the Himalayas.Much the longest such measurement hitherto made, it posed horrendous technical difficulties, made...
