the East India Company
Secrets of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street
Anne L. Murphy provides a vivid picture of clients, clerks and couriers, pay and perks, cases of fraud and incompetence and the underappreciated threat of fire and violence
One who got away
In 1694 London’s streets echoed with a call to the piratical life: Come all you brave boys, whose courage is…
The scourge of Christian missionaries in British-Indian history
Objectivity seems to be difficult for historians writing about Britain’s long and complicated relationship with India, and this makes the…
How Raffles stole the jewel of Singapore
Accounts of the founding of the British Empire once echoed the pages of Boy’s Own, featuring visionaries, armed with a…
Did the reprisals following the Indian mutiny seal Britain’s fate in the subcontinent?
Many and various are the things one finds in Kentish pubs (I’m told); but few could top the sepoy’s skull…
God help me shippies!
T.H. White complained that the characters in Walter Scott’s historical novels talked ‘like imitation warming pans’: those in Amitav Ghosh’s…
An empire within an empire
William Dalrymple is uncomfortably reminded of the astonishing savagery by which the East India Company maintained the Raj throughout the 19th century
Dirty white gold
If not for cotton, we would still be wearing wool. To equal current cotton production, we would need seven billion…
