Description
Book SynopsisA SUNDAY TIMES, THE TIMES, SPECTATOR, NEW STATESMAN, TLS BOOK OF THE YEAR
''A richly panoramic exploration of the British experience of India ... hugely researched and elegantly written, sensitive to the ironies of the past and brimming with colourful details'' Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times
The British in this book lived in India from shortly after the reign of Elizabeth I until well into the reign of Elizabeth II. Who were they? What drove these men and women to risk their lives on long voyages down the Atlantic and across the Indian Ocean or later via the Suez Canal? And when they got to India, what did they do and how did they live?
This book explores the lives of the many different sorts of Briton who went to India: viceroys and offcials, soldiers and missionaries, planters and foresters, merchants, engineers, teachers and doctors. It evokes the three and a half centuries of their ambitions and experiences, together wit
Trade Review
Hugely researched and elegantly written, sensitive to the ironies of the past and brimming with colourful details -- Dominic Sandbrook * Sunday Times *
Glorious, human, colourful, teeming and spicy. If you read just one book on imperial India, let it be this -- John Lewis-Stempel * Sunday Express *
An exceptional book. It evokes those animated crowd scenes painted by William Frith, full of people going about their workaday lives, or enjoying themselves. ... David Gilmour's canvas is British India and he provides the answers in a penetrating and vivid portrait of the British men and women who ran the show from the mid-18th century to 1947. -- Lawrence James * The Times *
