James Kerr, a captain in the East India Company, translated this Persian text on the history of the Marathas in India. Published in 1782, it was one of the first English works to appear on the subject. Its content was compiled for Kerr by a Hindustani using Persian manuscripts and oral tradition. The Marathas had replaced the Mughal emperors as controllers of a large part of the sub-continent by the beginning of the eighteenth century, and it was inevitable that they would come into conflict with the East India Company. At the time of publication, the first of the three Anglo Maratha wars had...

Scottish-born Alexander Mackay (1808 1852) spent most of his career as a journalist in Canada and the United States, though he had been called to the bar in 1847. In 1851 he was commissioned by the chambers of commerce of Manchester, Liverpool, Blackburn, and Glasgow to go to India and report on the cultivation of cotton there, especially around Gujarat. He stayed for a year and was on his way back to Britain his return forced by ill health when he died at sea in 1852. His Western India, however, was published the following year after it was revised by James Robertson. The book highlights the...

The purpose of this book, published in 1813 by Thomas Duer Broughton (1778 1835), is to provide an English audience with an accurate description of 'the character, manners, domestic habits and religious ceremonies of the Mahrattas'. Broughton, an army officer in the East India Company, first arrived in India while serving as a cadet in the Bengal establishment in 1795, and eventually rose to the positions of captain in 1805, major in 1816 and colonel in 1829. The book consists of a series of thirty-two letters addressed to his brother, and most of the letters describe the events and the...

Sir William Henry Sleeman (1788 1856) was a British soldier and administrator in India. While serving as Resident at the court of the King of Oude in Lucknow he travelled around the kingdom and made reports to the Governor-General regarding its proposed annexation by the East India Company. His letters and diaries reveal him as a capable and just administrator, who was at pains to weigh all the evidence for and against annexation, and who believed that reform of the existing administration would be possible. Sleeman described the kingdom of Oude as suffering from maladministration,...

Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779 1859) was appointed through family influence to the East India Company, and arrived in India in 1796. He learnt Persian, and developed an interest in Indian literature and politics. After postings in Afghanistan and Poona he became Governor in 1819 of the recently acquired territory that became known as the Bombay Presidency. His biographer also had connections to India. Thomas Edward Colebrooke (1813 1890) was the son of British administrator and Sanskrit scholar Henry Thomas Colebrooke (1765 1837), and although he lived in England and served as an M. P.,...

William Hoey (1849 1919) was a magistrate in Lucknow, India when this book was published by the American Missionary Press in 1880. At the time, Lucknow was the seventh largest city in the British Empire, and it was the capital of the province that had most recently come under British rule. Hoey's monograph captures the details of trade in the city and surrounding regions at this time of change. Part 1 outlines the prominent features of trade in the area and includes tables of imports and exports. Part 2 focuses on Lucknow specifically, and contains the author's discussion of the impact of...