Yale University Press
The Politics of Empire at the Accession of George III: The East India Company and the Crisis and Transformation of Britain's Imperial State
Key Metrics
- James M Vaughn
- Yale University Press
- Hardcover
- 9780300208269
- 9.3 X 6.1 X 1.1 inches
- 1.6 pounds
- History > Europe - Great Britain - General
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
In this bold debut work, historian James M. Vaughn challenges the scholarly consensus that British India and the Second Empire were founded in a fit of absence of mind. He instead argues that the origins of the Raj and the largest empire of the modern world were rooted in political conflicts and movements in Britain. It was British conservatives who shaped the Second Empire into one of conquest and dominion, emphasizing the extraction of resources and the subjugation of colonial populations. Drawing on a wide array of sources, Vaughn shows how the East India Company was transformed from a corporation into an imperial power in the service of British political forces opposed to the rising radicalism of the period. The Company's dominion in Bengal, where it raised territorial revenue and maintained a large army, was an autocratic bulwark of Britain's established order. A major work of political and imperial history, this volume offers an important new understanding of the era and its global ramifications.
Author Bio
James M. Vaughn is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. His main interests lie in the history of Britain and the history of the British Empire in the late seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. His current project examines the origins and early development of the British East India Company’s territorial empire in the context of metropolitan socio-political evolution and far-reaching global transformations in the eighteenth century.
Source: The University of Texas at Austin
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