Roderick Matthews Livres

How can we explain Britain's long rule in India beyond the clichés of 'imperial' versus 'nationalist' interpretations? In this new history, Roderick Matthews tells a more nuanced story of 'oblige and rule', the foundation of common purpose between colonisers and powerful Indians.Peace, Poverty and Betrayal argues that this was more a state of being than a system: British policy was never clear or consistent; the East India Company went from a manifestly incompetent ruler to, arguably, the world's first liberal government; and among British and Indians alike there were both progressive and conservative attitudes to colonisation. Matthews skilfully illustrates that this very diversity and ambiguity of British-Indian relations also drove the social changes that led to the struggle for independence.Skewering the simplistic binaries that often dominate the debate, Peace, Poverty and Betrayal is a fresh and elegant history of British India.

The modern history of south asia is shaped by the personalities of its two most prominent politicians and ideologues - mohammad ali jinnah and mahatma gandhi. Jinnah shaped the final settlement by consistently demanding pakistan, and gandhi defined the largely non-violent nature of the independence campaign. Theirs would seem to be a story of success, yet for each of them, the story ended in a kind of failure. How did two educated barristers who saw themselves as heralds of a newly independent country come to find themselves on opposite ends of the political spectrum? how did jinnah, who started out a secular liberal, end up a muslim nationalist? how did a god-fearing moralist and social reformer like gandhi become a national political leader? and how did their fundamental divergences lead to the birth of two new countries that have shaped the political history of the subcontinent? this bestselling book skillfully chronicles the incredible similarities and ultimate differences between the two leaders, as their admirers and detractors would have it and as they actually were.]