Dufferin urged upon an unresponsive government in London moderate proposals for representative reform in India. In fact, writes Briton Martin Jnr., reform was carried out twenty years later; too late, in the light of history.
Briton Martin Jnr. describes how Lord Dufferin set out for India, intending his rule to be a period of conservative calm, but found himself involved in the anxieties of “The Burmese Adventure”.
‘If this Empire seems an evil thing to me, it is not because I hate the British...’ B.G. Gokhale on Gandhi’s attitudes to empire upon the centenary of his birth.
From 1775 onwards, writes Mildred Archer, a succession of British officials delighted in the centre of Hindu religion and learning upon the banks of the Ganges.
From the first British Viceroy whom he encountered Gandhi received a decoration; the last, ten years ago, sat beside his funeral pyre. During the stormy intervening period he came into contact, and often into conflict, with six others; Francis Watson describes how each relationship marked a different stage in the long historical process that culminated in 1947.
By the 1840s, writes Gerald S. Graham, there flourished a fast regular steamship between Britain and India, with fierce competition between Calcutta and Bombay.
Following the Indian Mutiny of 1857, it was proposed that British soldiers of the defunct East India Company should become an integral part of the Royal forces. J.M. Brereton describes the troubles that resulted.
Margaret Martyn documents the troubles of a seventeenth century British trader, after twenty years in India.
J.M. Brereton describes how Russian advances in Central Asia alarmed the British authorities in London as well as in India.
The Sikhs of the Punjab were the last strong Indian military power in the early nineteenth century, writes Patrick Turnbull.
