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Author: U. Hillemann
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2009-10-15
Total Pages: 262
ISBN-13: 0230246753
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →British knowledge about China changed fundamentally in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rather than treating these changes in British understanding as if Anglo-Sino relations were purely bilateral, this study looks at how British imperial networks in India and Southeast Asia were critical mediators in the British encounter of China.
Author: Christopher Alan Bayly
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2005
Total Pages: 614
ISBN-13: 9780674017481
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In the early stages of the Second World War, the vast crescent of British-ruled territories stretching from India to Singapore appeared as a massive Allied asset. It provided scores of soldiers and great quantities of raw materials and helped present a seemingly impregnable global defense against the Axis. Yet, within a few weeks in 1941-42, a Japanese invasion had destroyed all this, sweeping suddenly and decisively through south and southeast Asia to the Indian frontier, and provoking the extraordinary revolutionary struggles which would mark the beginning of the end of British dominion in the East and the rise of today's Asian world. More than a military history, this gripping account of groundbreaking battles and guerrilla campaigns creates a panoramic view of British Asia as it was ravaged by warfare, nationalist insurgency, disease, and famine. It breathes life into the armies of soldiers, civilians, laborers, businessmen, comfort women, doctors, and nurses who confronted the daily brutalities of a combat zone which extended from metropolitan cities to remote jungles, from tropical plantations to the Himalayas. Drawing upon a vast range of Indian, Burmese, Chinese, and Malay as well as British, American, and Japanese voices, the authors make vivid one of the central dramas of the twentieth century: the birth of modern south and southeast Asia and the death of British rule.
Author: Karl E. Meyer
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2008-08-05
Total Pages: 288
ISBN-13: 0786724811
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →When Charles de Gaulle learned that France's former colonies in Africa had chosen independence, the great general shrugged dismissively, "They are the dust of empire." But as Americans have learned, particles of dust from remote and seemingly medieval countries can, at great human and material cost, jam the gears of a superpower. In The Dust of Empire, Karl E. Meyer examines the present and past of the Asian heartland in a book that blends scholarship with reportage, providing fascinating detail about regions and peoples now of urgent concern to America: the five Central Asian republics, the Caspian and the Caucasus, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan and long-dominant Russia. He provides the context for America's war on terrorism, for Washington's search for friends and allies in an Islamic world rife with extremism, and for the new politics of pipelines and human rights in an area richer in the former than the latter. He offers a rich and complicated tapestry of a region where empires have so often come to grief—a cautionary tale.
Author: David Veevers
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2020-06-11
Total Pages: 311
ISBN-13: 1108752519
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This is an important, revisionist account of the origins of the British Empire in Asia in the early modern period. David Veevers uncovers a hidden world of transcultural interactions between servants of the English East India Company and the Asian communities and states they came into contact with, revealing how it was this integration of Europeans into non-European economies, states and societies which was central to British imperial and commercial success rather than national or mercantilist enterprise. As their servants skilfully adapted to this rich and complex environment, the East India Company became enfranchised by the eighteenth century with a breadth of privileges and rights – from governing sprawling metropolises to trading customs-free. In emphasising the Asian genesis of the British Empire, this book sheds new light on the foreign frameworks of power which fuelled the expansion of Global Britain in the early modern world.
Author: Vinay Lal
Publisher:
Published: 2005
Total Pages: 318
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Offering a dissenting perspective on the politics of knowledge, this book is a powerful critique of the intellectual and cultural assumptions that underline the current processes of development, modernization and globalization. The author demonstrates that the world as we know it today is understood largely through categories that are the product of Western knowledge systems. His critique of the existing world order and his vision of possible futures encourage the reader to engage in the study of the West. Rather than merely reversing Orientalism, such a study would create a body of knowledge about the West that would enable people to better understand both themselves and the West. This important and lucidly written book deconstructs the cultural assumptions that have emerged alongside capitalism and offers a devastating critique of the politics of knowledge at the heart of all powerbroking.
Author: Song-Chuan Chen
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
Published: 2017-01-01
Total Pages: 241
ISBN-13: 9888390562
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Author: Markman Ellis
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Published: 2015-06-15
Total Pages: 328
ISBN-13: 1780234643
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Although tea had been known and consumed in China and Japan for centuries, it was only in the seventeenth century that Londoners first began drinking it. Over the next two hundred years, its stimulating properties seduced all of British society, as tea found its way into cottages and castles alike. One of the first truly global commodities and now the world’s most popular drink, tea has also, today, come to epitomize British culture and identity. This impressively detailed book offers a rich cultural history of tea, from its ancient origins in China to its spread around the world. The authors recount tea’s arrival in London and follow its increasing salability and import via the East India Company throughout the eighteenth century, inaugurating the first regular exchange—both commercial and cultural—between China and Britain. They look at European scientists’ struggles to understand tea’s history and medicinal properties, and they recount the ways its delicate flavor and exotic preparation have enchanted poets and artists. Exploring everything from its everyday use in social settings to the political and economic controversies it has stirred—such as the Boston Tea Party and the First Opium War—they offer a multilayered look at what was ultimately an imperial industry, a collusion—and often clash—between the world’s greatest powers over control of a simple beverage that has become an enduring pastime.
Author: Gareth Knapman
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-09-07
Total Pages: 244
ISBN-13: 1351622765
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This collection of essays collects the leading scholars on British colonial thought in Southeast Asia to consider the question: what was the relationship between liberalism and the British Empire in Southeast Asia? The empire builders in Southeast Asia: Lord Minto, William Farquhar, John Leyden, Thomas Stamford Raffles, and John Crawfurd - to name a few - were fervent believers in a liberal free trade order in Southeast Asia. Many recent studies of British imperialism, and European imperialism more generally, have addressed how the anti-imperialist tradition of Eighteenth century liberalism was increasingly intertwined with the discourses of empire, freedom, race and economics in the nineteenth century. This collection extends those studies to look at the impact of liberalism on. British colonialism in Southeast Asia and early nineteenth century Southeast Asia we see some of the first attempts at developing multicultural democracies within the colonies, experiments in free trade and attempts to use free trade to prevent war and colonisation.
Author: James Hevia
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2012-06-28
Total Pages: 313
ISBN-13: 1139510444
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The Imperial Security State explores an important but under-explored dimension of British imperialism - its information system and the close links between military knowledge and the maintenance of empire. James Hevia's innovative study focuses on route books and military reports produced by the British Indian Army military intelligence between 1880 and 1940. He shows that together these formed a renewable and authoritative archive that was used to train intelligence officers, to inform civilian policy makers and to provide vital information to commanders as they approached the battlefield. The strategic, geographical, political and ethnographical knowledge that was gathered not only framed imperial strategies towards colonized areas to the east but also produced the very object of intervention: Asia itself. Finally, the book addresses the long-term impact of the security regime, revealing how elements of British colonial knowledge have continued to influence contemporary tactics of counterinsurgency in twenty-first-century Iraq and Afghanistan.
