Gandhi's non-violent struggles against racism, violence, and colonialism in South Africa and India had brought him to such a level of notoriety, adulation that when asked to write an autobiography midway through his career, he took it as an opportunity to explain himself.
THE IDEA OF INDIA was originally published to mark the 50th anniversary of India's independence and has since established itself as a uniquely valuable and authoritative book on a key subject.
This new book represents a complete rewriting of Romila Thapar's hugely successful HISTORY OF INDIA - VOLUME ONE, thirty-four years after it was first published.
With wit, intelligence and his trademark eye for riveting detail, John Julius Norwich has brought together the most important and fascinating events from his trilogy of the rise and fall of the Byzantine empire.
The vast crescent of British-ruled territories from India down to Singapore appeared in the early stages of the Second World War a massive asset in the war with Germany, providing huge quantities of soldiers and raw materials and key part of an impregnable global network denied to the Nazis.
'Bracingly apocalyptic stuff: atmospheric, chock-full of information and with a constantly escalating sense of pace and tension' Sunday TelegraphSimon Winchester's brilliant chronicle of the destruction of the Indonesian island of Krakatoa in 1883 charts the birth of our modern world.
Six Records of a Floating Life (1809) is an extraordinary blend of autobiography, love story and social document written by a man who was educated as a scholar but earned his living as a civil servant and art dealer.
The great city of Beijing, capital of China from the ninth century, and given its form for five hundred years by the Ming Dynasty, was for a millennium one of the most extraordinary places on earth.
'China's reemergence as a global economic powerhouse has compressed into a single generation an industrial and urban revolution on a scale the world has never seen.
This extraordinary book is a vivid, highly original account of the creation of a new Asia after the Second World War - an unstoppable wave of nationalism that swept the British Empire aside.
Freedom from Fear - collected writings from the Nobel Peace prize winner Aung San Suu KyiAung San Suu Kyi's collected writings - edited by her late husband, whom the ruling military junta prevented from visiting Burma as he was dying of cancer - reflects her greatest hopes and fears for her fellow Burmese people, and her concern about the need for international co-operation in the continuing fight for Burma's freedom.
Churchill's description of the fall of Singapore on 15 February 1942, after Lt-Gen Percival's surrender led to over 100,000 British, Australian and Indian troops falling into the hands of the Japanese, was no wartime exaggeration.
This chronicle of the Byzantine Empire, beginning in 1025, shows a profound understanding of the power politics that characterized the empire and led to its decline.
This book analyzes the Central Asian economies of Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, from their buffeting by the commodity boom of the early 2000s to its collapse in 2014.
An exploration of how the Greeks reacted to and interacted with India from the third to first centuries BCEWhen the Greeks and Macedonians in Alexander's army reached India in 326 BCE, they entered a new and strange world.
It has long been contended that the Indian Constitution of 1950, a document in English created by elite consensus, has had little influence on India's greater population.
Letters from Burma - an unforgettable collection from the Nobel Peace prize winner Aung San Suu KyiIn these astonishing letters, Aung San Suu Kyi reaches out beyond Burma's borders to paint for her readers a vivid and poignant picture of her native land.
'A fine achievement by a huge new talent' William Dalrymple, Sunday TimesIn 1857 the native troops of the Bengal army rose against their colonial masters.
An iconoclastic history of the first two decades after independence in IndiaNehru's India brings a provocative but nuanced set of new interpretations to the history of early independent India.
A path-breaking study of ordinary Chinese people and how they perceive their lives and opportunities in modern China Glossy television images of happy, industrious, and increasingly prosperous workers show a bright view of life in twenty-first-century China.
The Killing Season explores one of the largest and swiftest, yet least examined, instances of mass killing and incarceration in the twentieth century-the shocking antileftist purge that gripped Indonesia in 1965-66, leaving some five hundred thousand people dead and more than a million others in detention.
When Siraj, the ruler of Bengal, overran the British settlement of Calcutta in 1756, he allegedly jailed 146 European prisoners overnight in a cramped prison.
Before the advent of synthetic fibers and cargo containers, jute sacks were the preferred packaging material of global trade, transporting the world's grain, cotton, sugar, tobacco, coffee, wool, guano, and bacon.
A momentous debate has been unfolding in China over the last fifteen years, only intermittently in public view, concerning the merits of socialism as a philosophy of social justice and as a program for national development.
In the early twentieth century, a time of political fragmentation and social upheaval in China, poverty became the focus of an anguished national conversation about the future of the country.
A fascinating history of China's relations with the West-told through the lives of two eighteenth-century translatorsThe 1793 British embassy to China, which led to Lord George Macartney's fraught encounter with the Qianlong emperor, has often been viewed as a clash of cultures fueled by the East's lack of interest in the West.
A cultural history of the concept of pharmacy, both the material nature of drugs and the trade in medicine, in early modern China Know Your Remedies presents a panoramic inquiry into China's early modern cultural transformation through the lens of pharmacy.
How China is using the US-led war on terror to erase the cultural identity of its Muslim minority in the Xinjiang regionWithin weeks of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, the Chinese government warned that it faced a serious terrorist threat from its Uyghur ethnic minority, who are largely Muslim.
A pioneering history that transforms our understanding of the colonial era and China's place in itChina has conventionally been considered a land empire whose lack of maritime and colonial reach contributed to its economic decline after the mid-eighteenth century.
The unknown history of economic conservatism in India after independenceNeoliberalism is routinely characterized as an antidemocratic, expert-driven project aimed at insulating markets from politics, devised in the North Atlantic and projected on the rest of the world.
How the global tea industry influenced the international economy and the rise of mass consumerismTea has been one of the most popular commodities in the world.
The last three decades have seen a massive expansion of China's visual culture industries, from architecture and graphic design to fine art and fashion.
The most comprehensive and authoritative dictionary of Buddhism ever produced in EnglishWith more than 5,000 entries totaling over a million words, this is the most comprehensive and authoritative dictionary of Buddhism ever produced in English.
With little domestic fanfare and even less attention internationally, Japan has been reinventing itself since the 1990s, dramatically changing its political economy, from one managed by regulations to one with a neoliberal orientation.
A multifaceted history of Ho Chi Minh's climactic victory over French colonial might that foreshadowed America's experience in VietnamOn May 7, 1954, when the bullets stopped and the air stilled in Dien Bien Phu, there was no doubt that Vietnam could fight a mighty colonial power and win.
How British authorities and Indian intellectuals developed ideas about deviant female sexuality to control and organize modern society in IndiaDuring the colonial period in India, European scholars, British officials, and elite Indian intellectualsphilologists, administrators, doctors, ethnologists, sociologists, and social criticsdeployed ideas about sexuality to understand modern Indian society.
