Archives of Empire v 1 From East India Company to Suez Canal

A rich collection of primary materials, the multivolume Archives of Empire provides a documentary history of nineteenth-century British imperialism. Barbara Harlow and Mia Carter have carefully selected a diverse range of texts that track the debates over imperialism in the ranks of the military, the corridors of political power, the lobbies of missionary organizations, the halls of royal geographic and ethnographic societies, the boardrooms of trading companies, the editorial offices of major newspapers, and farflung parts of the empire itself. Focusing on a particular region and historical period, each volume reveals the complexities of nineteenth-century colonialism and emphasizes its enduring relevance to the 'global markets' of the twenty-first century. This volume, From the East India Company to the Suez Canal, traces the beginnings of the British colonial enterprise in South Asia and the Middle East. It includes key texts from the era of the privately owned British East India Company through the crises that led to the company's takeover by the Crown in 1858 to the momentous opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Government proclamations, military reports, and newspaper articles appear here alongside pieces by Rudyard Kipling, Charles Dickens, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Benjamin Disraeli, and many others. A number of documents chronicle arguments between mercantilists and free trade advocates over the competing interests of the nation and the East India Company. Others provide accounts of imperial crises -- including the trial of Warren Hastings, the Indian Rebellion (Sepoy Mutiny), and the Arabi Uprising -- that highlight the human, political, and economic costs of imperial domination and control.