Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire
ISBN: 9781139053501
Platform/Publisher: Cambridge Core / Cambridge University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: South Asian history; European history after 1450;

The past twenty years have seen a proliferation of specialist scholarship on the period of India's transition to colonialism. This volume provides a synthesis of some of the most important themes to emerge from recent work and seeks in particular to reassess the role of Indians in the politics and economics of early colonialism. It discusses new views of the 'decline of the Moghuls' and the role of the Indian capitalists in the expansion of the English East Indian Company's trade and urban settlements. Professor Bayly considers the reasons for the inability of indigenous states to withstand the British, but also highlights the relative failure of the Company to transform India into a quiescent and profitable colony. Later chapters deal with changes in India's ecology, social organisation and ideologies in the nineteenth century, and analyse the nature of Indian resistance to colonialism, including the rebellion of 1857.

Christopher Alan Bayly was born on May 18, 1945 in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, United Kingdom. He graduated from St Antony's College. He was the pre-eminent historian of India and the British Empire and a pioneer of the field of global history. He wrote numerous books during his lifetime including The Local Roots of Indian Politics; Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars; Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire; Imperial Meridian; Empire and Information; The Origins of Nationality in South Asia; The Birth of the Modern World; and Recovering Liberties. In 2005, he received the Wolfson prize for history for his entire body of work. In 2007, he was the first scholar to be knighted "for services to history outside of Europe." He died of a heart attack on April 18, 2015 at the age of 69.

(Bowker Author Biography)


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