The Basham Lecture 2002 : Pakistan and India: political legacies from the Colonial era

Abstract

As some of you have already heard me say elsewhere one of the major publishing triumphs of recent years in the study of the history which concerns us all has been the five volumes of the Oxford History of the British Empire published in the two years, 1998-99, with 149 chapters by 128 different authors and amounting in total to 3300 pages. For my purposes this evening I want to begin by focusing on two sets of arguments, which the Oxford History advances, which seem to me of first importance for our understanding of present day South Asia. One of these is scattered through three or four chapters in its first and second volumes on the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries, while the second is concentrated in one chapter in the third volume on the Nineteenth Century.