British Empire
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘British Empire’
Young inventor James Watt’s life in London was overshadowed by the perpetual fear of being snatched.
In 1756, James Watt was not yet the creator of the first commercial steam engine, but a lowly maker of scientific instruments in London. The Seven Years’ War was just getting under way, and Watt was so afraid of being scooped up for service at sea or in some colonial plantation that he dared not go out of his door.
Georgian Britain braced for war as relations with France in North America, India and mainland Europe took a turn for the worse.
The Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) reached from French and British colonies in North America and India to states in modern-day Germany. It seemed glorious at the time for Britain, but it doubled the national debt, and measures to recover the costs triggered the American War of Independence.
Arthur Wellesley watches on as one of his soldiers is rescued from a watery grave.
Arthur Wellesley (not yet the Duke of Wellington) spent the years 1797 to 1804 in India, confronting the Maratha Empire that threatened Indian princes and the British alike. Wisely, he learnt to make war as the Maratha did, and acquired a proper respect for the elephant.
The East India Company’s top agent in India was also the man who put Calcutta on the world map.
Calcutta (Kolkata) in West Bengal was the capital of British India from the start of the Raj in 1857 to 1911, when King George V announced a move to Delhi. Calcutta was not the first choice location for British commercial activity in Bengal, but it proved to be the best, and that was to the credit of one man, Job Charnock.
Sir John Seeley urged us to cherish our close ties to India and other nations beyond Europe.
Victorian essayist and historian Sir John Seeley urged his readers to think more about our ties of language, blood, culture and history with the countries of our loose and far-flung Empire, and less about ‘little England’ and her mere geographical proximity to Continental Europe.
A maths prodigy from Madras became so wrapped up in his sums that he forgot to pass his examinations.
In 1914, a young Indian mathematician with no formal qualifications came to England. Some thought his scribbled theorems were a pastiche of half-understood fragments, or even that he was a fraud, but others sensed they were gazing into the depths of one of the most mysterious mathematical minds they had known.