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Three thousand years of Chinese history in an accessible and authoritative single volume.Despite the recent rise of China to a position of dominance on the world economic stage, Chinese history remains an elusive subject. Yet it is this vast narrative of appalling loss, superhuman endeavour and incredible invention that has made China the superpower it is today. From the dawn of legend to the succession of great dynasties, from Confucius to Chairman Mao and from the clamour of revolution to the lure of slick capitalism, John Keay takes the reader on a sweeping tour through Chinese history. This is a definitive and indispensable account of a country set to play a major part in our future.

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A history of the English East India company.During 200 years the East India Company grew from a loose association of Elizabethan tradesmen into «the grandest society of merchants in the universe». As a commercial enterprise it came to control half the world's trade and as a political entity it administered an embryonic empire. Without it there would have been no British India and no British Empire. In a tapestry ranging from Southern Africa to north-west America, and from the reign of Elizabeth I to that of Victoria, bizarre locations and roguish personality abound. From Bombay to Singapore and Hong Kong the political geography of today is, in some respects, the result of the Company. This book looks at the history of the East India Company.

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The first single-volume history of India since the 1950s, combining narrative pace and skill with social, economic and cultural analysis. Five millennia of the sub-continent’s history are interpreted by one of our finest writers on India and the Far East. This edition does not include illustrations.Older, richer and more distinctive than almost any other, India’s culture furnishes all that the historian could wish for in the way of continuity and diversity. The peoples of the Indian subcontinent, while sharing a common history and culture, are not now, and never have been, a single unitary state; the book accommodates Pakistan and Bangladesh, as well as other embryonic nation states like the Sikh Punjab, Muslim Kashmir and Assam.Above all, the colonial era is seen in the overall context of Indian history, and the legacy of the 1947 partition is examined from the standpoint of today.

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A vivid description of one of the most ambitious scientific projects undertaken in the 19th century, and the men who undertook the measurement of the Himalayas and the mapping of the Indian subcontinent: William Lambton and George Everest.The graphic story of the measurement of a meridian, or longitudinal, arc extending from the tip of the Indian subcontinent to the mountains of the Himalayas.Much the longest such measurement hitherto made, it posed horrendous technical difficulties, made impossible physical demands on the survey parties (jungle, tigers, mountains etc.), and took over 50 years. But the scientific results were commensurate, including the discovery of the world’s highest peaks and a new calculation of the curvature of the earth’s surface.The Indian Mutiny of 1857 triggered a massive construction of roads, railways, telegraph lines and canals throughout India: all depended heavily on the accuracy of the maps which the Great Arc had made possible.

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The story of both a dramatic journey retracing the historic voyage of France’s greatest 19th-century explorer up the mysterious Mekong river, and a portrait of the river and its peoples today.Any notion of sailing up the Mekong in homage to Francis Garnier has been unthinkable until now. From its delta in Vietnam up through Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Burma and on into China, the Mekong has been a no-go river, its turbulent waters fouled by ideological barriers as formidable as its natural obstacles. But recently the political obstacles have begun to be dismantled – river traffic is reviving.John Keay describes the world of the Mekong as it is today, rehabilitating a traumatised geography while recreating the thrilling and historic voyage of Garnier in 1866. The French expedition was intended to investigate the ‘back door’ into China by outflanking the British and American conduits of commerce at Hong Kong and Shanghai. Two naval gunboats headed upriver into the green unknown, bearing crack troops, naturalists, geologists and artists. The two-year expedition’s failures and successes, and the tragedy and acrimony that marked it, make riveting reading.

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Two hundred years ago, India was seen as a place with little history and less culture.Today it is revered for a notable prehistory, a magnificent classical age and a cultural tradition unique in both character and continuity. How this extraordinary change in perception came about is the subject of this fascinating book.The story, here reconstructed for the first time, is one of painstaking scholarship primed by a succession of sensational discoveries. The excitement of unearthing a city twice as old as Rome, the realization that the Buddha was not a god but a historical figure, the glories of a literature as rich as anything known in Europe, the drama of encountering a veritable Sistine chapel deep in the jungle, and the sheer delight of categorizing ‘the most glorious galaxy of monuments in the world’ fell, for the most part, to men who were officials of the British Raj. Their response to the unfamiliar – the explicitly sexual statuary, the incomprehensible scripts, the enigmatic architecture – and the revelations which resulted, revolutionized ideas not just about India but about civilization as a white man’s prerogative.A companion volume by the author of the highly praised India: A History and The Great Arc.

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The first single-volume history of India since the 1950s, combining narrative pace and skill with social, economic and cultural analysis. Five millennia of the sub-continent’s history are interpreted by one of our finest writers on India and the Far East. This edition does not include illustrations.Older, richer and more distinctive than almost any other, India’s culture furnishes all that the historian could wish for in the way of continuity and diversity. The peoples of the Indian subcontinent, while sharing a common history and culture, are not now, and never have been, a single unitary state; the book accommodates Pakistan and Bangladesh, as well as other embryonic nation states like the Sikh Punjab, Muslim Kashmir and Assam.Above all, the colonial era is seen in the overall context of Indian history, and the legacy of the 1947 partition is examined from the standpoint of today.

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An accessible, authoritative single-volume narrative history of China, from the earliest times to the present day, designed both to engage the general reader and to challenge the horizons of the China specialist.Most histories of China appear to have been written by sinologists for sinologists. As China rejoins and perhaps comes to dominate our world order, the need for an authoritative yet engaging history is universally acknowledged.Modelled on the author's own 'India: A History', 'China: A History' is informed by a wide knowledge of the Asian context, an approach devoid of Euro-centric bias, and acclaimed narrative skills. Broadly chronological, the book presents a history of all the Chinas – including those regions (Yunnan, Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia, Manchuria) that account for two thirds of the People's Republic of China land mass but which barely feature in its conventional history (which tends to concentrate on the succession of mainly north China imperial dynasties).The book also examines the many non-Chinese elements in China's history – the impact of Buddhism, Islam and Christianity; the effects of trade; the nature of 'barbarian' invasion; the relevance of many imperial dynasties being of non-Chinese origin.Major archaeological discoveries in the last two decades afford a chance to flesh out and correct much of the written record. 'China: A History' will tell the epic story from the time of the Three Dynasties (2000-220 BC) to Chairman Mao and the current economic transformation of the country.

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If British India had not been partitioned in 1947, its population would today be comfortably the world’s largest. At c1.5 billion, Midnight’s Descendants (the offspring of those affected by ‘the midnight hour’ Partition) already outnumber Europeans and Chinese; and they are growing faster than either. By 2020 they will constitute a quarter of the world’s entire population. As well as comprising the peoples of what is now called ‘South Asia’ (the preferred term for the partitioned subcontinent of modern India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, plus Nepal and Sri Lanka) they are widely established across the globe.Midnight’s Descendants is the first general history ever published to treat the region as a whole. Correlating and contrasting the fortunes of all the constituent nations over the last six decades affords unique insights into the tensions and conflicts that divide what is being hailed as one of the world’s most dynamic regions.Written by a widely respected expert on the region, the book will be the first account to incorporate the rich story of South Asia’s transnational, or ‘diasporic’, peoples. It will examine attitudes towards their homeland of the 22 million overseas South Asians, and will assess their contributions to the self-image of the parent states, to economic survival in the case of Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and to India’s globalised achievement.Like Midnight’s Children, Midnight’s Descendants will be expansive and tumultuous in the great tradition of India’s narrative epics.

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