Britain

Gerald Morgan introduces Byron’s friend and executor; a radical Whig and head of the East India Company during the Afghan troubles of 1835-43.

As Consul General for Great Britain in Egypt, Henry Salt established a friendly understanding with the free Albanian Viceroy Mohamed Ali. John Brinton describes how, through their relationship, Salt was able to rescue many treasures of ancient Egyptian art.

James Edward Oglethorpe obtained a charter for the founding of Georgia in 1732. Courtney Dainton describes how the English social reformer spent three terms as chief administrator of the colony and lived long enough to see American independence.

The Sikh Empire was the last strong Indian military power standing against Britain’s East India Company.

Though all his life Burke fought against injustice, cruelty and oppression, his attitude towards the slave-trade was at times ambiguous. Yet, writes Robert W. Smith, the great writer was the first statesman in Britain or Ireland to produce a plan for ending it.

Christopher Hibbert describes how the massacre at Cawnpore was one of the events in the Indian Mutiny not expected by benevolent British Commanders.

‘Unwearied in the office of friendship’, all his life Crabb Robinson was devoted to men of genius and faithfully recorded their behaviour, as Joanna Richardson here discusses.

Politically, Mayor Adenauer admitted, the British occupation was always scrupulously fair. By D.G. Williamson.

In Spain, writes James Marshall-Cornwall, Melbourne’s government supported the Legitimists with an Auxiliary Legion.

Griffith was neither a spell-binding orator nor a dashing leader; but, writes Richard Davis, he helped to ensure that no authoritarian regime was established in Ireland after 1921.