India

By the 1840s, writes Gerald S. Graham, there flourished a fast regular steamship between Britain and India, with fierce competition between Calcutta and Bombay.

Following the Indian Mutiny of 1857, it was proposed that British soldiers of the defunct East India Company should become an integral part of the Royal forces. J.M. Brereton describes the troubles that resulted.

Margaret Martyn documents the troubles of a seventeenth century British trader, after twenty years in India.

J.M. Brereton describes how Russian advances in Central Asia alarmed the British authorities in London as well as in India.

The Sikhs of the Punjab were the last strong Indian military power in the early nineteenth century, writes Patrick Turnbull.

Christopher Hibbert describes how the massacre at Cawnpore was one of the events in the Indian Mutiny not expected by benevolent British Commanders.

Victory over the tribesmen on the North-west frontier of British India, writes James Lunt, is still commemorated by Sikh regiments.

William Gardener describes how silks, tobacco and tea from China were exchanged across the deserts northwest of Peking for furs, cloth and leather from Asiatic Russia.

Francis Watson describes the long and adventurous history of the Koh-i-Noor; between the fourteenth century, when its existence first became known, and 1839, when, at Queen Victoria’s request, it joined the British Crown Jewels.

An island in a sea of mountains, as Sarah Searight describes it, the Indian region of Ladakh was once a cosmopolitan centre of pilgrimage and trade.