True to Their Salt
True to Their Salt

Author: Robert Johnson

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-05-14

Total Pages: 550

ISBN-13: 0190694580

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In the last decade an Iraqi Army and an Afghan National Army were created entirely from scratch, the founding of which was deemed to be a crucial measure for the establishment of security and the withdrawal of Western forces from Iraq and Afghanistan. Raising new armies is always problematic, especially during an insurgency, but doing so outside the sovereignty of one's own state raises questions of legality, concerns about their conduct and the risk of an over-empowered local military. The recruitment of proxies, including former insurgents, or the arming of local fighters and auxiliaries, levies and militias, may also exacerbate an internal security situation. In seeking answers to this conundrum Robert Johnson turns to history. His book sets out how recruitment of local auxiliaries was an essential component of European colonialism, and how, in the transfer of power and security at the end of that colonial era, the raising of local forces using existing Western models became the norm. He then offers a comprehensive survey of the post-colonial legacy, particularly the recent utilization of surrogates and auxiliaries, the work of embedded training teams, and mentoring.

The Strangled Traveler
The Strangled Traveler

Author: Martine van Wœrkens

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2002-11

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 9780226850856

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British colonists in 1830s India lived in terror of the Thugs. Reputed to be brutal criminals, the Thugs supposedly strangled, beheaded, and robbed thousands of travelers in the goddess Kali's name. The British responded with equally brutal repression of the Thugs and developed a compulsive fascination with tales of their monstrous deeds. Did the Thugs really exist, or did the British invent them as an excuse to seize tighter control of India? Drawing on historical and anthropological accounts, Indian tales and sacred texts, and detailed analyses of the secret Thug language, Martine van Woerkens reveals for the first time the real story of the Thugs. Many different groups of Thugs actually did exist over the centuries, but the monsters the British made of them had much more to do with colonial imaginings of India than with the real Thugs. Tracing these imaginings down to the present, van Woerkens reveals the ongoing roles of the Thugs in fiction and film from Frankenstein to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Old World Empires
Old World Empires

Author: Ilhan Niaz

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-03-26

Total Pages: 546

ISBN-13: 1317913787

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This book is a sweeping historical survey of the origins, development and nature of state power. It demonstrates that Eurasia is home to a dominant tradition of arbitrary rule mediated through military, civil and ecclesiastical servants and a marginal tradition of representative and responsible government through autonomous institutions. The former tradition finds expression in hierarchically organized and ideologically legitimated continental bureaucratic states while the latter manifests itself in the state of laws. In recent times, the marginal tradition has gained in popularity and has led to continental bureaucratic states attempting to introduce democratic and constitutional reforms. These attempts have rarely altered the actual manner in which power is exercised by the state and its elites given the deeper and historically rooted experience of arbitrary rule. Far from being remote, the arbitrary culture of power that emerged in many parts of the world continues to shape the fortunes of states. To ignore this culture of power and the historical circumstances that have shaped it comes at a high price, as indicated by the ongoing democratic recession and erosion of liberal norms within states that are democracies.

Empire
Empire

Author: Niall Ferguson

Publisher:

Published: 2004-04-14

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 9780465023295

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This grand narrative history of the world's first experiment in globalization offers lessons for an ever-expanding American Empire--from England's most talented young historian.

Colonial connections, 1815–45
Colonial connections, 1815–45

Author: Zoë Laidlaw

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2013-07-19

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1784990000

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This groundbreaking book challenges standard interpretations of metropolitan strategies of rule in the early nineteenth century. After the Napoleonic wars, the British government ruled a more diverse empire than ever before, and the Colonial Office responded by cultivating strong personal links with governors and colonial officials through which influence, patronage and information could flow. By the 1830s the conviction that personal connections were the best way of exerting influence within the imperial sphere went well beyond the metropolitan government, as lobbyists, settlers and missionaries also developed personal connections to advance their causes. However, the successive crises in the 1830s exposed these complicated networks of connection to hostile metropolitan scrutiny. This book challenges traditional notions of a radical revolution in government, identifying a more profound and general transition from a metropolitan reliance on gossip and personal information to the embrace of new statistical forms of knowledge. The analysis moves between London, New South Wales and the Cape Colony, encompassing both government insiders and those who struggled against colonial and imperial governments.

Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1830s
Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1830s

Author: John Gardner

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2024-06-06

Total Pages: 649

ISBN-13: 1009268503

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This instalment in the Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition series concerns a decade that was as technologically transitional as it was eventful on a global scale. It collects work from a group of internationally renowned scholars across disciplinary boundaries in order to engage with the wide array of cultural developments that defined the 1830s. Often overlooked as a boundary between the Romantic and Victorian periods, this decade was, the book proposes, the central pivot of the nineteenth century. Far from a time of peaceful reform, it was marked by violent colonial expansion, political resistance, and revolutionary technologies such as the photograph, the expansion of steam power, and the railway that changed the world irreversibly. Contributors explore a flurry of cultural forms to take the pulse of the decade, from Silver Fork fiction to lithography, from working-class periodicals to photographs, and from urban sketches to magazine fiction.

Bibliography of Imperial, Colonial, and Commonwealth History Since 1600
Bibliography of Imperial, Colonial, and Commonwealth History Since 1600

Author: Andrew N. Porter

Publisher: Clarendon Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 1088

ISBN-13:

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Britain's overseas history has never been well supplied with comprehensive bibliographical aids, and, despite extensive public interest in the subject, the position has steadily worsened. Following the recent Oxford History of the British Empire, this volume is therefore designed to provide a general source of reference and bibliographical guidance, at once wide-ranging, up-to-date, and accessible.

The Making of India
The Making of India

Author: Kartar Lalvani

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2016-03-10

Total Pages: 616

ISBN-13: 1472924835

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The first ever history of India to explore the benefits – institutional, political and civil – of British Colonial Rule on the subcontinent. The story of The Making of India begins in the seventeenth century, when a small seafaring island, one tenth the size of the Indian subcontinent, despatched sailing ships over 11,000 miles on a five-month trading journey in search of new opportunities. In the end they helped build a new nation. The sheer audacity and scale of such an endeavour, the courage and enterprise, have no parallel in world history. This book is the first to assess in a single volume almost all aspects of Britain's remarkable contribution in providing India with its lasting institutional and physical infrastructure, which continues to underpin the world's largest democracy in the twenty-first century.