{"product_id":"edge-of-empire-isbn-9781400075461","title":"Edge of Empire","description":"In this imaginative book, Maya Jasanoff uncovers the extraordinary stories of collectors who lived on the frontiers of the British Empire in India and Egypt, tracing their exploits to tell an intimate history of imperialism. Jasanoff delves beneath the grand narratives of power, exploitation, and resistance to look at the British Empire through the eyes of the people caught up in it. Written and researched on four continents, \u003ci\u003eEdge of Empire\u003c\/i\u003e enters a world where people lived, loved, mingled, and identified with one another in ways richer and more complex than previous accounts have led us to believe were possible. And as this book demonstrates, traces of that world remain tangible—and topical—today. An innovative, persuasive, and provocative work of history.\"Spirited, teeming. . . . Jasanoff wants us to rethink the imperial experience.\"  –\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\"Astute and moving. . . . As original--and beautifully written—as it is compelling to read.” –\u003ci\u003eThe New York Sun\u003c\/i\u003e“A historical tour de force, with wonderfully original and unusual material moulded into a convincing new narrative. Britain’s empire will never look the same again.”–\u003ci\u003eThe Guardian\u003c\/i\u003e\"Instead of concentrating on the 18th-and 19th-century European empire builders. . . . Jasanoff focuses on several ambitious, energetic, and eccentric men who used the East as a way to reinvent themselves....a fascinating and untold story.\" –\u003ci\u003eThe Boston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eMaya Jasanoff\u003c\/b\u003e is the Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard. She is the author of the prize-winning \u003ci\u003eEdge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East\u003c\/i\u003e,\u003ci\u003e 1750-1850\u003c\/i\u003e (2005) and \u003ci\u003eLiberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World\u003c\/i\u003e (2011), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Non-Fiction and the George Washington Book Prize. A 2013 Guggenheim Fellow, Jasanoff won the 2017 Windham-Campbell Prize for Non-Fiction. Her essays and reviews appear frequently in publications including \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Guardian\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e.Most histories would begin the account of Britain, France, and their   empires not in the East, but in the West: in North America, where   Britain’s thirteen colonies and New France commanded the Atlantic   seaboard, and where the two powers had been vying for dominance since   the early 1600s. Their competition reached its climax in the middle of   the eighteenth century, during the Seven Years War. The focus of their   antagonism was access to the alluring expanse of land beyond the   Pennsylvania frontier. With that struggle, Britain and France were   effectively fighting for the future of North America: who would win the   right to shape it, and whose empire would thrive. Perhaps this story   should begin in the West, too, on the banks of the St. Lawrence River,   in the summer of 1759, where the best-known eighteenth-century scene of   Anglo-French imperial war unfolded—the battle of Quebec, whose   set-piece quality brought recurrent patterns of British and French   conflict vividly to life.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Since the declaration of war in 1756, British attempts to advance into   New France had been frustrated. But in the early summer of 1759, a   British offensive advanced into Canada along the lower St. Lawrence,   arriving at the key French city of Quebec. All summer long the British   lay camped by the river, besieging the heavily fortified town perched   on the cliffs above. But the French, secure in their position and   numbers, remained implacable, while British attempts to attack the city   from below were repulsed. In September, British commanders fixed on a   plan to strike Quebec from above and so lure the enemy out to battle on   the Plains of Abraham, to the north. It was a bold maneuver. The cliffs   were steep, the city was strong, the British severely outnumbered. But   now, three months into the siege, it was time for such a move. On the   night of September 12, 1759, a silent flotilla of British boats crossed   the perilous St. Lawrence River and landed nearly five thousand men,   who scrabbled up the beetling cliffs in a thin red line.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    With the sun rising in a low mist, the black, pungent smell of   waterlogged soil, damp, but no more rain: it was as good a day as any   for battle. Behind Quebec’s thick stone walls, the sleepless French   commander, the Marquis de Montcalm, had heard cannon fire in the night   and knew that some sort of trouble was at hand. In the morning, he   gathered his men and trooped out of the city to see what had happened.   Perhaps the British had managed to squeeze a few hundred men up the   cliff? Instead he confronted a stunning sight. There, not one mile   ahead of him, stood the entire British force, thousands of redcoats   like beacons in the mist. There was no choice but to attack. At ten   o’clock, the French charged, only to be cut down, just forty paces from   the British line, by a barrage of musket fire. Through the clearing   smoke and chaos of bodies, the British began their counterattack; the   French, confused and terrified, scattered in the face of attack. “They   run; see how they run!” cried a British soldier. “Never was a rout more   complete than that of our army,” reported a Frenchman. At nine o’clock   that very night, the French began to retreat from Quebec, leaving the   city—and the keys to French Canada—in the hands of their British foes.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    What had been months, even years, in the making, was over in a matter   of hours. So were the lives of the French and British commanders. The   Marquis de Montcalm took a ball in the torso late in the action, and   was carried back to the town, bleeding profusely and saying, “It’s   nothing, it’s nothing.” Through the long night of retreat, he lay   dying; his burial the next day, in the words of the historian Francis   Parkman, “was the funeral of New France.” Out on the Plains of Abraham,   the young British general James Wolfe aimed to achieve a more glorious   death. While he was leading the charge against the French lines, his   wrist was shattered by a bullet; still he rushed, till two more hit him   in the belly and the chest, and he fell to the ground. Some officers   said that on the river crossing the previous night, Wolfe had been   reciting Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” If so,   one line would have particularly resonated: “The paths of glory lead   but to the grave.” As if on cue, Wolfe expired near the battlefield,   while his men charged to victory around him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    General Wolfe’s victory at Quebec is one of the grand scenes of British   imperial history, a rare individual battle that really did (seem to)   turn the tables. And like so many acclaimed victories, its drama rested   in part on a string of depressing defeats that had preceded it. Now,   three years into the fighting, Britons finally had something to   celebrate: voices were raised in hymns and prayers of thanksgiving,   church bells rang, fireworks exploded. Wolfe’s fatal heroism was   applauded and retold in popular ballads, stage plays, published   firsthand accounts, paintings and prints. By far the most famous   representation appeared a full decade later, however. The Death of   General Wolfe, painted by an up-and-coming Pennsylvania-born artist   called Benjamin West, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in the spring   of 1771. Promptly reproduced in a bestselling etching, relentlessly   emulated—and satirized—the painting became an instant icon of British   art. Part of its appeal lay in an arresting immediacy: rarely if ever   had a grand-manner history painting depicted its protagonists in modern   dress rather than classical togas. But more lay in its subject matter.   This was the ultimate clash of civilizations. The Seven Years War is   known in America as the French and Indian War, and those were the   villains: effete French aristocrats, Jesuits, natives of blood-curdling   savagery. Arrayed against them, in West’s picture, stood the best of   the British Empire: bluff John Bulls in their red coats, tartan-wrapped   Scots, sturdy colonials from New England farms, and a pensive,   statuesque Indian fresh from the Ontario woods. (The Indian, among   other things, was a pure invention of West’s; none fought with Wolfe.)   This was the British Empire of the 1760s as it liked to be seen. No   accident that it was painted by a colonial—and at a tense moment in   Anglo-American relations, at that.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Thanks partly to its flattering misrepresentations, West’s painting   conveyed two key points about the Seven Years War: this was a war   between Britain and France for imperial power, and a war that Britain   triumphantly won. Yet the painting’s enduring popularity takes   attention away from what, in retrospect, may well have been the   defining imperial battle of this defining imperial war. For while Wolfe   at Quebec seized the imagination of his peers (and many since), it was   a near-contemporaneous victory on the other side of the world that   would ultimately have more effect on the shape of the British Empire.   It had been won two years earlier, at Plassey, on the steamy banks of   the River Hooghly, in Bengal. There, in 1757, East India Company troops   under the command of Robert Clive defeated the nawab of Bengal and   asserted military dominance in a territory larger than Britain itself.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Distant though it was from the European and North American flashpoints   of the Seven Years War, and an Anglo-French battle only by proxy (the   nawab was said to be cultivating French allies), the victory at Plassey   set in train a series of events that affected Britain’s global position   as profoundly as the defeat of the French in Quebec. With the nawabs   beaten and an East India Company puppet installed instead, the Mughal   power structure in Bengal was decisively dislodged. The Company sealed   its victory in 1765, when the emperor granted it the right to collect   Bengal’s valuable tax revenue, the diwani. From this point onward, the   East India Company took on the functions of a state in addition to   those of a merchant body. Soon it was India, not the thirteen colonies,   that would claim the heart of the British Empire.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    If one had to announce a time and place for the birth of the modern   British Empire, then it would be in the far-flung contests of the Seven   Years War. Many of the consequences of that conflict, such as a   strengthening of British imperial patriotism, had long antecedents. And   many of the changes wrought by the war were in some ways merely a   prologue to the epochal upheavals of the Revolutionary-Napoleonic Wars   to come. Nevertheless, the Seven Years War marked a watershed in the   history of the British and French empires.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In territorial scope alone, the war surpassed previous conflicts. Since   1689, Britain and France had fought three long wars already, on the   European continent and increasingly overseas. But this was the   fiercest, most expensive, and most expansive war that Britain and   France had waged to date. They clashed everywhere, from Montreal to   Martinique, from the mouth of the Gambia in West Africa to the sudden   rock outcroppings of South India. And almost everywhere, Britain won.   The scale of British victory surprised even the victors. The prime   minister William Pitt the Elder, who trumpeted patriotism as his   watchword, dubbed 1759 his annus mirabilis: in that year alone, Wolfe   secured British dominance in Canada; the French navy was demolished and   Britain won access to the Mediterranean; and at Minden, in Hanover,   British forces helped score that most precious of feats, a decisive   land victory over France. Less than a year later, Sir Eyre Coote   continued to rout France in India with his victory at Wandewash, in the   south. The Americas, the Continent, and India: it seemed as if the   whole world was falling into British hands, and at France’s expense.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But victory had its price. After peace was signed in the Treaty of   Paris in 1763, Britain faced an empire that was larger, costlier, and   more far flung than ever before. Manpower had to be found to defend it,   manpower for which Britain regularly turned to its margins and   colonies—Scotland, Ireland, America, and increasingly India. Money had   to be found to pay for it, money that Britain also looked to its   colonies to provide. The notorious Stamp Act, passed in 1765, imposed a   tax on printed material in the thirteen colonies. In 1767 followed the   Townshend Duties on various British imports in America, including tea,   which had fast become a staple of imperial trade and of the   Anglo-American palate. Britain could justify these duties in part as a   way of asking the colonists to contribute to the costs of their own   defense. To some colonists, however, the taxes seemed to be little   better than the despotic measures of the Oriental tyrants in the   empires of the East. If the Seven Years War won Britain a greater   empire than ever, it also touched off the financial and political   crises that would cause the thirteen colonies to break away not twenty   years later.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The Seven Years War had a profound effect on Britain’s imperial   geography, winning Britain important footholds around the world but   also fatally weakening its ability to rule the thirteen colonies. These   changes in where Britain had its empire were accompanied by changes in   the kind of empire it now possessed. Historians used to treat the   American Revolution as a dividing line between two distinct eras of   British imperial history: a “first” British empire that was Atlantic,   colonial, and mercantile; and a “second” empire, based in Asia and   characterized by conquest and direct rule. The opposition of these two   misleads. For what the Seven Years War heralded was the emergence of a   British Empire that could be both Atlantic and Asian, commercial and   conquering. It marked the beginning of a modern British Empire that was   global and land-based, one that needed enormous resources—human,   economic, and cultural—to keep it going.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The Seven Years War also had tremendous significance for the French   empire—but not, as conventional wisdom would have it, simply by ringing   its death knell. (Almost no historians write about the overseas French   empire between 1763 and the invasion of Algeria in 1830.) Indeed,   though France lost the war, it pursued its ongoing struggle with   Britain with renewed vigor. The ink was hardly dry on the peace treaty   before Louis XV’s shrewd chief minister, the Duc de Choiseul, began to   prepare for the guerre de revanche. France reformed and modernized its   army, and substantially increased the size of its navy—a navy that   performed against Britain to devastating effect at Yorktown in 1781,   precipitating Britain’s surrender in the American Revolution. It built   up its continental alliances, and its Caribbean commerce flourished.   Finally, France turned its imperial eyes keenly toward the East.   Choiseul and his successors actively researched the possibility of   invading Egypt—the stepping-stone to India—and sent Admiral   Bougainville scouting for new colonies in the Pacific, thus provoking   Britain. Because French history is so often divided up by political   régimes (the Ancien Régime, Napoleon’s First Empire, the Restoration,   and so on), continuities across periods often get neglected. But if   one looks at French imperial policy, a more unified picture emerges.   Notably, some of Choiseul’s undertakings would find echo under Napoleon   a generation later. French imperialism did not die after the Seven   Years War; it just changed its tune.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Rather than put an end to Anglo-French imperial rivalry, then, or tip   the scales definitively in Britain’s favor, the Seven Years War opened   a new chapter in the history of both the British and French empires. It   signified a turn toward territorial gain and, with it, direct rule over   manifestly foreign subjects. It also, critically, marked a swing to the   East as a site of imperial desire. From this point on, the history of   British and French imperial rivalry would unfold there, and in India in   particular. Over the course of the next century, British power   dramatically expanded in India and steadily reached beyond it, to   Egypt, China, Afghanistan. France dedicatedly worked to thwart British   expansion in India and to build its own influence in the Middle East   and North Africa, where by 1900 it would be the dominant European   power. In short, the Seven Years War fueled an Anglo-French competition   for Eastern empire that would burn on and explode, in India and Egypt,   more than thirty years later. So what did the British Empire look like   viewed from the mango groves of Plassey, instead of from the Plains of   Abraham? In many ways, rather different. Unlike Quebec, Plassey was not   fought for the open conquest of territory, nor was it fought explicitly   against the French. It was chiefly fought not by Crown troops but   instead by the private army of the East India Company and its native   Indian troops, or sepoys, in defense of commercial interests. And to   stand in contrast to the youthfully gallant (if also neurotically   self-absorbed) Wolfe of Quebec, Plassey cast into the public eye an   altogether more complicated and more equivocal hero: Robert Clive, who,   while hailed by some in Britain as the “heaven-born general,” would   also find himself, and the empire he represented, the target of public   attack. The history of British imperial collecting in the East began   with the battle of Plassey and with Robert Clive. For it was there that   Britain began to collect its empire in India and began the process of   its own imperial refashioning, from a mercantile, Atlantic-based,   colonial power to a global territorial ruler and an imperial   nation-state. It was also at Plassey that Robert Clive became British   India’s first major imperial collector, acquiring a vast personal   fortune that he would use to transform himself into the greatest—and   most reviled—potentate of Britain’s emerging empire in the East.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302089478373,"sku":"NP9781400075461","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400075461.jpg?v=1767725871","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/edge-of-empire-isbn-9781400075461","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}