Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779 1859) was a colonial official who spent his career in India, eventually becoming governor of Bombay in 1819. Before that he was resident in Poona (Pune) during the final days of the Maratha empire. He was fluent in Persian and took an interest in the culture of the region. This report, however, published in 1821, is a political work. The report describes the western Indian territory that the British had acquired by 1818, and Elphinstone provides a geographical overview of the area and the people who lived there. He then gives a brief sketch of Maratha history...

Henry T. Prinsep (1792 1878) was the son of a prominent East India Company servant, and like his father, Prinsep also spent much of his life in the East. He left Britain for Calcutta in 1809, at the age of seventeen, and stayed in India, working in a variety of roles, until his retirement in 1843. His brother James also lived in India and was a prominent scholar. Upon the latter's death in 1840, Prinsep found himself in possession of his brother's coin collection and a notebook, which became the basis of this work, published in 1844. Prinsep explains that the coins which have inscriptions in...

Henry T. Prinsep (1792 1878) was the son of a prominent East India Company servant, and like his father, he spent much of his life in the East. He left Britain for Calcutta in 1809, at the age of seventeen, and stayed in India, working in a variety of roles, until his retirement in 1843. He wrote a number of books about India: in this work, published in 1851, he turns to the north of the subcontinent. Prinsep draws from travel narratives of the few explorers who had been to this territory which corresponds to today's western China and Mongolia to illustrate the lives of the people there....

Florence Kelley (1859 1932) was a committed socialist and political reformer who campaigned against child labour in the United States. In 1899 she became the leader of the National Consumers' League, an anti-sweatshop and pro-minimum wage pressure group which she supported until her death. This volume, first published in 1914, describes her views on the problems facing American society due to the expansion of industry. Kelley discusses the negative effects of rapid industrialisation on the American urban working class, in terms of the effects on the family, on the health of workers, on the...

Little is known about Charles L. Money, who sailed in 1861 from Gravesend to New Zealand, where, as he recounts in this volume, he spent the next seven years, working as a gold prospector, a surveyor, a sheep hand, a baker's boy, and a log splitter. He also spent periods in the military, serving in McDonnell's campaign against the Maori in the second Taranaki war (1863 6), which was instrumental in establishing colonial control of the area, and participating in the notorious Pokaikai raid, an eyewitness account of which is included in the book. Money also, pragmatically, worked with, and...

Alphonse Aulard (1849 1928) was the first French historian to use nineteenth-century historicist methods in the study of the French Revolution. Pioneered by German historians such as Leopold van Ranke, this approach emphasised empiricism, objectivity and the scientific pursuit of facts, rather than the philosophical and literary concerns that had guided earlier scholars. Aulard's commitment to archival investigation is evidenced by the many edited collections of primary sources that appear in his extensive publication record. In these eight volumes of papers analysing the French Revolution...

This famous pamphlet published anonymously in 1776 because of its seditious content by the British political radical Thomas Paine (1737 1809) laid out his pioneering ideas for American independence, and earned him the title of 'Father of the American Revolution'. The Declaration of Independence, written chiefly by Thomas Jefferson and famously promulgated later that year, was influenced by Paine's arguments in this work: that America was too large to be governed by a country as small as Britain which, he claimed, was ruling America only for its own financial gain and that the colonies had now...

Little is known of the true origins of the French adventurer Victor-Antoine-Claude Robert, Count de Parades (1752 86). He arrived in Paris in 1778, just as the Franco-American alliance, which guaranteed French military support to the United States against Great Britain, was being signed. Parades was determined to join the French Army, but lacking the connections to do so, offered his services as a spy. He travelled repeatedly to England, visiting ports and fortifications to gather confidential information. First published in 1791, this work provides a detailed account of Parades' adventures...

When George William Rusden (1819 1903) was fourteen, his family emigrated from England to Australia, where he later became a prominent educationalist and civil servant, responsible for establishing national schools. In 1883, after retiring to England, he published histories of Australia and New Zealand, both of them sympathetic to the indigenous populations. The latter proved controversial and resulted in a libel case against Rusden, which he lost. Aureretanga, first published in 1888, was written with the purpose of exposing British abuses of the Treaty of Waitangi, which had ceded New...

First published in 1781, this work of the Abbe Raynal (1713 69) is the English translation of the last volume of his widely known and influential Philosophy and Political History of the East and West Indies which first appeared in 1770. Raynal's work begins a description of the distressed state of England in 1763 and her calls for help from the colonies in the build-up to the war. Written during the Revolution itself, the book speculates about the ending of the conflict in chapters entitled 'What ought to be the politics of the House of Bourbon, if victorious' and 'What idea should be formed...