Reading time: 10 minutes
On 18th July 1947, British rule in India came to an end, closing a 300-year old chapter in the history of the subcontinent. But another empire had been in India for over a century more, and it would be over a decade later that this longer story was finished.
Reading time: 4 minutes
Shapurji Saklatvala was born in India in 1874, the son of a merchant. His maternal uncle founded what is today the Tata group – a multinational conglomerate. Saklatvala worked for the company for part of his career, and first moved to England to run the Manchester office. After moving to England, he married Sarah Marsh, who came from a Derbyshire family, and they went on to have five children.
Reading time: 6 minutes
It was ‘the biggest currency black market in history’, a secret operation under the auspices of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), Britain’s Second World War clandestine warfare organisation. This was Operation Remorse, a deeply imperial venture, dedicated to maintaining the commercial interests and prestige of the British Empire – sometimes acting in direct competition with its allies. Most significantly, it was a dramatic success. It returned over 15 times the money invested, a return totalling £77,741,758 at the time – about £2.5 billion today. It achieved this feat by smuggling valuable luxury items, trading wartime goods, and most profitably by manipulating exchange rates in illicit currency transactions on the Chinese Black Market. The money financed several British operations and organisations in China.
Reading time: 27 minutes
Around 1850 Britain had no forestry service and there was no formal training of foresters. Forestry was still practised in the context of estates mainly owned by the aristocracy and managed by foresters who had learned the traditional management techniques under an apprentice system from their predecessors. British forestry was fragmented, not formalised, and far from centralised during the entire 19th century.
Reading time: 6 minutes
This August marks 75 years since the partition of the Indian subcontinent. British withdrawal from the region prompted the creation of two new states, India and Pakistan.
The process of transferring power grossly simplified diverse societies to make it seem like dividing social groups and drawing new borders was logical and even possible. This decision unleashed one of the biggest human migrations of the 20th century when more than ten million people fled across borders seeking safe refuge.
Reading time: 7 minutes
It was estimated by Force 136 that they recruited around 20,000 indigenous personnel for operations in Burma. A few hundred of them are on my Men of SOE Burma page, compiled by going through several files of training cards. While the research for that page has provided excellent insight into a cross section of the many Burmese peoples who served with SOE, most of the 20,000 will remain unaccounted for because there is no record of them. Sadly, this means that their service will never be recognised outside of their own families.
Reading time: 8 minutes
The battle of El Alamein in late 1942 was the turning point for the North African campaign, which saw the fighting rage back and forth between Libya and Egypt. As with most of the battles in the region, Australians played a vital role in the eventual Allied victory. In this article, we go over their experiences during this pivotal battle.
THE IMPACTS OF CORPORATE GLOBALIZATION: HOW THE DUTCH EAST INDIA COMPANY CHANGED THE WORLD Reading...
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Reading time: 6 minutes Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies Winston Churchill arrives at...
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Reading time: 4 minutes In her new book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson...
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Estimated reading time: 11 minutes Robert Clive, a general of the East India Company, was despised...
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Reading time: 6 minutes
For the last 1,000 years and until very recently, scholars have held that the Indian sub-continent was under ‘Muslim rule’ between the 11th Century and end of the 90 year British Raj. That has recently been challenged by two scholars, Richard M Eaton and Naveena Naqvi who argue that the rule was culturally led rather than religiously led.
