British Empire
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘British Empire’
A street urchin of Lahore takes it on himself to provide a naive Tibetan monk with a hot meal.
Young Kim O’Hara, who knows all the ways and wiles of the dusty streets of Lahore, has promised to help a Tibetan monk beg for his dinner. He has high hopes of a certain grocer’s wife, but she is not disposed to dole out charity to yet another holy man.
Economist Adam Smith so changed the conversation in Britain that most people take his groundbreaking insights for granted.
Adam Smith’s free market ‘Wealth of Nations’ had an immediate and highly beneficial impact on British economic policy, one whose ripples spread across the world. Yet as biographer Richard Haldane explains, so successful was Smith in changing the conversation that most people have now forgotten all about him.
When Lord Salisbury asked the Russian Minister of the Interior how many agents the Tsar had in India, the reply came as a shock.
Throughout the nineteenth century, London was afraid that the Russian Empire would invade India through Afghanistan. Russian reassurances fell on deaf ears, leading to war in Afghanistan in 1838-42 and again in 1878-80. Lord Lytton, the Viceroy of India, issued a press crackdown, and Russophobia in the home press spiked.
Prussia’s invasion of Silesia in 1740 plunged Europe into turmoil, and a French invasion of England became a very real threat.
The War of the Austrian Succession began as part of the seemingly endless German quest to gobble up the continent’s smaller states. It would not have involved Britain had King George II not been also Elector of Hanover, and if France had not seen it as an opportunity to expand her empire at Britain’s expense.
Abdullah Abdul Kadir gives us his first-hand impressions of the Founder of Singapore and of his first wife, Olivia.
In 1808, young colonial secretary Stamford Raffles went down the Malaysian coast from Penang to the formerly Dutch colony of Malacca as a rest cure. There, Raffles and his wife Olivia made the acquaintance of Abdullah Abdul Kadir, a local teacher of Malay, who left us his pen-portrait of them.
The busy trading hub of Malacca was to be consigned to history, until Stamford Raffles saw that history was one of its assets.
Stamford Raffles (1781-1826) is known today as the founder of Singapore, but his first foray into statecraft came when he was still in his late twenties. In 1808, as assistant secretary to the Governor of Penang he penned an impassioned report which saved Malacca, modern-day Melaka in Malaysia, from oblivion.