What the British 'knew' about China changed fundamentally in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. During this period, China became a key focus of British commercial and missionary interests, creating urgent demand for new knowledge about the country. This change in British understanding of and views about Chinese language, culture, politics and economy has typica...(展开全部)

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 toget...(展开全部)

Buddhism is indisputably gaining prominence in the West, as is evidenced by the growth of Buddhist practice within many traditions and keen interest in meditation and mindfulness. In The Lotus and the Lion, J. Jeffrey Franklin traces the historical and cultural origins of Western Buddhism, showing that the British Empire was a primary engine for curiosity about and then engage...(展开全部)

At the start of the twenty-first century we are acutely conscious that universities operate within an entangled world of international scholarly connection. Empire of scholars examines the networks that linked academics across the colonial world in the age of 'Victorian' globalization. Stretching across the globe, these networks helped map the boundaries of an expansive but exc...(展开全部)

How modern data-driven government originated in the creation and use of administrative archives in the British Empire Over the span of two hundred years, Great Britain established, governed, lost, and reconstructed an empire that embraced three continents and two oceanic worlds. The British ruled this empire by correlating incoming information about the conduct of subjects and...(展开全部)

The reality of being top dog is that everybody hates you. In this provocative book, noted historian and commentator Jeremy Black shows how criticisms of the legacy of the British Empire are, in part, criticisms of the reality of American power today. He emphasizes the prominence of imperial rule in history and in the world today, and the selective way in which certain countries...(展开全部)

The bestselling complete history of the British Navy - our national story through a different prism. The story of our navy is nothing less than the story of Britain, our culture and our empire. Much more than a parade of admirals and their battles, this is the story of how an insignificant island nation conquered the world's oceans to become its greatest trading empire. Yet, as...(展开全部)

Talented young historian Maya Jasanoff tells an alternative history of the British Empire, one that brings us the very personal stories of those British people who found themselves on the edges of Empire. Instead of a story of `conquest', she brings us startling and fascinating stories of cross-cultural exchange. A Palladian mansion filled with western art in the centre of old ...(展开全部)

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Western scientific interest in China focused primarily on natural history. Prominent scholars in Europe as well as Westerners in China, including missionaries, merchants, consular officers, and visiting plant hunters, eagerly investigated the flora and fauna of China. Yet despite the importance and extent of this scientific activity, ...(展开全部)

A brilliant, multifaceted chronicle of economic and social change. -- The New York Times "No praise can be too high." -- The New York Review of Books At the outset of the 1870s, the British aristocracy could rightly consider themselves the most fortunate people on earth: they held the lion's share of land, wealth, and power in the world's greatest empire. By the end of the ...(展开全部)