Sunday, April 19, 2015

Top ten books about the British in India

Ferdinand Mount is the author of The Tears of the Rajas: Mutiny, Money and Marriage in India 1805-1905.

One of his top ten books about the British in India, as shared at the Guardian:
The Great Mutiny by Christopher Hibbert (1978)

For the British, there was no more traumatic event in the entire 19th century than the Great Mutiny. The European officers were cut down by their own men whose loyalty they had trusted, and their women and children were butchered in what looks like a variety of ethnic cleansing. This savage ingratitude for the supposed blessings of British rule provoked a retaliation on a far greater scale, which shocked public opinion “at home” as much as the mutiny itself. Hibbert’s book is the best short account of those terrible months.
Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue