India

Alaric Jacob introduces the soldiers and administrators who prepared the way for nineteenth-century Empire.

W.J. Reader describes a scandalous episode that arose out of the transfer of authority in India from the East India Company to the Crown.

Born on the banks of the Rhone, this enlightened French missionary was the first European to carry out a comprehensive survey of the manners and customs of the Hindus. Roderick Cameron describes how the book that he wrote, which he published with the encouragement of the British East India Company, remains a classic in its own field.

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.