India

Robin Hallett describes how, when the maritime powers of Europe were battling for supremacy in the Orient, the isles of the Indian Ocean played their part in history.

Iris Macfarlane describes how, during the early sixteenth century, two dominant cultures, Mughal and European, first began to spread on Indian soil.

While the Pilgrim Fathers were drawing up plans for sailing to America, writes Iris Macfarlane, Thomas Roe in India was laying the foundations in a very different form of British Empire.

Among military adventurers who have served in India, Mildred Archer writes, none was more dashing than the half-Indian leader of the famous Irregular Cavalry Corps known as Skinner’s Horse.

From 1798 until 1805, the Marquess Wellesley presided over a great extension of British influence, deliberately seeking to make the King’s Government in Whitehall the real paramount power in the sub-continent. A.S. Bennell begins the first of three studies of British Governors-General in India.

S. Gopal describes how, in the course of eight years, Dalhousie greatly extended the territories of the East India Company. Today his memory is respected by Indians not as one of the builders of the British Empire but as one of the architects of the Indian Republic.

Jon Manchip White describes how a garrison of 1,050 Europeans and 712 loyal Indians held the Residency at Lucknow against an army of 30,000 Sepoys.

Some of the fiercest fighting of the Indian Mutiny took place in and around the ancient capital of the Moguls, where the last Mogul sovereign exercised a shadowy power until 1857. This is the second of three articles by Jon Manchip White on the origins and development of the nineteenth-century Indian Revolt against British Rule.

Between 1744 and 1767, the eldest son of a small Shropshire squire laid the foundations of what was to become the British Indian Empire. By Percival Spear.

Steven Watson offers a defence of Britain's imperial experience in India.