India: History/Culture

"Diplomacy and Political Secrets comprises a compilation of rare China-related historical documents selected from three series within the India Office Records now held at the British Library: the Political and Secret Department Records, the Burma Office records, and the Records of the Military Department. These documents consist of manuscripts and monographs in the form of reports, memoranda, correspondence, pamphlets and official publications, intelligence diaries, accounts of political and scientific expeditions, travel diaries, handbooks and maps.

"From its roots as an Anglican evangelical movement driven by lay persons, this resource encompasses publications from the CMS and the latterly integrated South American Missionary Society. Documenting missionary work from the 19th to the 21st century, the periodicals include news, journals and reports offering a unique perspective on global history and cultural encounter."

The Churchill Archive' is a massive resource that brings together online nearly a million documents amassed by Winston Churchill through out his lifetime, including hand-written notes and private letters. It will also offer an expanding range of additional materials - pedagogical resources and secondary materials, video and audio content, and more."Published in October 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing in collaboration with the Churchill Archives Centre, the Churchill Archive is a digital library of modern international history. It includes more than 800,000 pages of original documents, produced between 1874 and 1965, ranging from Winston S. Churchill's personal correspondence to his official exchanges with kings, presidents, politicians, and military leaders"--Publisher's description.Complementing the core content, the Churchill Archive offers a range of additional materials, including pedagogical resources and secondary materials, plus editorially selected links to other resources, video and audio content, and biographical and bibliographic databases. The original papers for this collection are deposited at Churchill College, Cambridge, UK, with complementary materials sourced from various locations in the UK.

Offers access to a unique collection of India Office Records from the British Library, London. Containing royal charters, correspondence, trading diaries, minutes of council meetings and reports of expeditions, among other document types, this resource charts the history of British trade and rule in the Indian subcontinent and beyond from 1600 to 1947.

A collection of full-text primary source materials on ca. 400 different cultural, ethnic, religious and national groups in the following regions of the world: Asia, Europe, Africa, Middle East, North America, Oceania, Eurasia and South America. Access is via keyword, as well as through geographic (OWC) codes and a topical (OCM) classification scheme.

Evangelism in India took the form primarily of village itineration where male and female missionaries ministered to the spiritual needs of the populace while simultaneously attending to their medical and educational needs. The collection documents the Board of Foreign Missions' tripartite ministry (Farukhabad, Punjab, and the West Indian missions) in India but also reflects the development of the modern Indian state in a broader sense. Reaction to foreigners generally and Protestant missionaries specifically, discontent with British rule and the development of the Independence movement, and racial and internecine religious warfare between Hindu and Muslim populations are well documented.

"The United States' principal record of political and historical open source intelligence"--Readex.

"This resource brings together manuscript, printed and visual primary source materials for the study of global commodities in world history. The commodities featured in this resource have been transported, exchanged and consumed around the world for hundreds of years. They helped transform societies, global trading operations, habits of consumption and social practices."

During World War I, Indian nationalists took advantage of Great Britain's preoccupation with the European war by attempting to foment revolution in India to overthrow British rule. Their activities were aided politically and financially by the German Government. Indian nationalists in the United States were active in the independence movement effort through fundraising, arms buying, and propagandizing through the Hindustan Ghadar newspaper published in San Francisco.

Independent India's first years were marked with turbulent events - partition, a massive exchange of population with Pakistan, the Indo-Pakistani War of 1947 and the integration of over 500 princely states to form a united nation. This collection identifies the key issues, individuals, and events in the history of the Subcontinent between 1945 and 1949, and places them in the context of the complex and dynamic regional strategic, political, and economic processes that have fashioned India in the postwar period.

Drawing upon the manuscript collections of the National Library of Scotland, this searchable online resource provides access to digital facsimiles of diaries and journals, official and private papers, letters, sketches, paintings and original Indian documents containing histories and literary works. The collection documents the relationship between Britain and India in an empire where the Scots played a central role as traders, generals, missionaries, viceroys, governor-generals and East India Company officials. The dates of the documents range from 1710 to 1937.

For generations of British and Indian Officers and men, the North-West Frontier was the scene of repeated skirmishes and major campaigns against the trans-border Pathan tribes who inhabited the mountainous no-man's land between India and Afghanistan. This collection contains Army Lists; Orders; Instructions; Regulations; Acts; Manuals; Strength Returns; Orders of Battle; Administration Summaries; organization, commissions, committees, reports, maneuvers; departments of the Indian Army; and regimental narratives. This collection is a welcome addition to the new-flourishing literature on the military history of South Asia and the growing field of serious study of the British military experience in India.

The documents in this resource come from the archives of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG). Some are true archives, arising from the work of the Society in India; some are manuscripts which cover the period when the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), founded in 1698 was working with the Royal Danish (Lutheran) Mission, founded in 1705. They chart the history of Anglican Protestant engagement in the region from shortly after the strategic turning point in the fortunes of the East India Company wrought by Colonel Robert Clive in the 1750s, through to the toppling of Tipu Sultan in 1799, the controversial changes to the EIC's charter in 1813, the Sepoy Rebellion of 1856-1857, and on right through to Partition in 1947. As with the Society's missions elsewhere in the world, the documents also trace the gradual shift that began in the early 19th century from a church dependent on English priests to one increasingly led by indigenous clergy. Accompanied by an online guide to the collection by Isobel Pridmore, formerly the archivist at the USPG, whose archives are now held at Rhodes House Library in Oxford.

"The papers of two leading actors in the East India Company in mid-18th century Bengal from the National Library of Wales. Chiefly in English, but with an array of original correspondence with local figures in Indo-Persian and occasionally Bengali, Marathi and Tamil, this collection allows researchers to understand the complex political web in the subcontinent as the power of the Mughal Empire began to wane."

"Correspondence and papers of Sir Gilbert Elliot Murray Kynynmound (1751-1814), who succeeded as 4th Bart. in 1777, assumed the additional names of Murray Kynynmound on succeeding to his mother's properties in 1778, and was created Baron Minto in 1797 and Earl of Minto in 1813. He was M.P. for Morpeth, 1776-7, for Roxburghshire, 1777- 1784, for Berwick-upon-Tweed, 1786-90, and for Helston, 1790-5; and served as Civil Commissioner at Toulon, 1793, Minister to the Italian states, 1794, Viceroy of Corsica, 1794-1796, Ambassador at Vienna, 1799-1801, President of the Board of Control, 1806, and Governor-General of India, 1806-1813. These papers are a valuable source for the study of British politics in the late eighteenth century, of war and diplomacy in Europe, 1793-1801, and for events in India and east of the Cape, 1806-1814. The diplomatic and Indian material is especially rich. The papers in this section are used and quoted in Emma Eleanor Elizabeth, Countess of Minto (ed.), Life and Letters of Sir Gilbert Elliot, First Earl of Minto, from 1751 to 1806, 3 vols., London, 1874, and Life and Letters of Sir Gilbert Elliot, First Earl of Minto, from 1807 to 1814, London, 1880. The 1st Earl of Minto is referred to throughout these papers simply as 'the 1st Earl'. His wife, Anna Maria, daughter of Sir George Amyand, 1st Bart., is referred to as 'the Countess of Minto'. Unless otherwise stated, correspondence and papers are of, and letters are addressed to, the 1st Earl."

"The papers of Gilbert John Elliot-Murray-Kynynmound, the 4th Earl of Minto, (1845-1914), Viceroy of India between 1905 and 1910, cover a period of dramatic and momentous change in the history of colonial India. The beginning of Minto's tenure in India was marked by unprecedented anti-colonial protests against the partition of Bengal, initiated by Minto's predecessor, Curzon. It ended with the crucial 'Morley-Minto reforms' contained in the Government of India Act and the Indian Councils Act, both of 1909. These two new laws established, among other things, the constitutional principle of separate electorates for India's Muslim communities. This rich, varied and complex collection of documents forms part of a larger archive now held at the National Library of Scotland, and which covers almost the entire Elliot family of Minto. The 4th Earl's great-grandfather was the first family member to build an official connection with the Indian subcontinent, assuming the office of Governor General in 1807. Almost a century later, the 4th Earl was confronted with the sensitive political situation surrounding the partition of Bengal and the rise of radical nationalism in that same province, as well as in Maharashtra and Punjab. A key part of this collection contains weekly reports on the 'political situation', which reflect not only specifically Indian preoccupations, but also their impact on British domestic politics. For example, the correspondence of March and April 1906, between Minto and John Morley, Secretary of State for India, document how the latter had interviewed a deputation of fifty textile workers who were calling for the institution of health and medical inspectors into the Bombay factory system, ostensibly protesting against the 'callous inhumanity to children' working in India, but with one eye on British employers' concerns about Indian competition. There is also material here for the researcher of Indian social and educational history including, for example, detailed discussions on the founding of Aligarh Muslim University and on educational reform. Other parts of the collection move beyond India, to India's empire in Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf, including for example, letters relating to Minto's early personal experience as an officer fighting on the North West Frontier in 1879, as well as correspondence with Cromer in relation to Egypt, Earl Grey in relation to wider colonial and imperial affairs and correspondence with governors of other imperial territories, for example Canada, around wider Indian migration. This collection therefore covers a period in which the confidence of high imperialism in India was facing some its first real challenges, and when the whole basis of British imperial power in its most important possession was being adjusted and reformed in response to changing imperial priorities. A notable inclusion in these documents which provides the context for this, is a full survey of the turn of the century administration of Lord Curzon - Minto's predecessor. Beyond this, the Minto collection offers to the research a unique insight into a formative period of radical Indian nationalism, Muslim separatism and Indian constitutional reform."

"On 20 March 1929, thirty-one people, suspected of either communist or trades unionist affiliations, were arrested across India, including Bombay, Calcutta and Poona. They were to be shortly followed by a thirty-second person - Hugh Lester Hutchinson - in June of the same year. Collectively, they were charged "under section 121A of the Indian Penal Code, of conspiracy to deprive the King of the sovereignty of British India." Ever since the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917, there grew a ubiquitous fear within the West of the spread of communism via Moscow's chief manifestation, the Comintern (Communist International). Indeed, it had long been suspected by the India Office that the Comintern had instructed the three Britons charged in the trial - Philip Spratt, Ben Bradley and Lester Hutchinson - to travel to India with the specific task of engendering a revolutionary espirit de corps within India's own growing trades union movements. More than this, however, the Meerut trial also demonstrates an indigenous expression of anti-colonialism from which, it could be argued, the British authorities were ultimately unable to counter. Given the highly protracted nature of the trial, public sympathy for the accused and imprisoned grew rapidly and the following documents add weight to this assertion. Collectively drawn from the British Library, Labour History Archive & Study Centre and Working Class Movement Library, the following documents bring together an array of differing, and balanced, perspectives on both the trial itself as well as its consequences for British imperialism as the sun was beginning to set on the Empire."

"Oral history online is a landmark index to English language oral histories. Working with archives, repositories and individuals we've indexed oral histories that are publicly available on the Web and that are held by repositories and archives around the world. Our intent is to make it possible to find and explore the voices of more than 300,000 individuals."--Introd.

A companion archive to India from Crown Rule to Republic, 1945-1949, this collection traces the end of British India and the emergence of modern Pakistan. Representative documents with valuable details include the "Economic Survey," dated April-June 1949, and issued by the Board of Economic Inquiry, West Punjab, Lahore, and "Dacca Newsletter," dated July 1949. The collection is sourced from the Central Files of the General Records of the Department of State. The records are under the jurisdiction of the Legislative and Diplomatic Branch of the Civil Archives, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.

"This nationalist daily and one of the largest newspapers in India, was founded in 1924 by the leader of the Akali movement, Sunder Singh Lyallpuri. Introduced at the opening ceremony by Mahatma Gandhi and edited by his son, Devdas Gandhi, the Hindustan Times played an essential role in the Indian independence movement. Today this historical newspaper serves researchers interested in studying colonialism and post-colonialism, British and world history, class and gender issues, international relations, comparative religion, international economics, terrorism, and more. This paper is the second most widely read English newspaper in India (after The Times of India)."--Publisher information

The Times of India (1838-2001) offers full page and article images with searchable full text back to the first issue. The collection includes digital reproductions providing access to every page from every available issue for the following titles: The Bombay times and journal of commerce (1838-1859), The Bombay times and standard (1860-1861), and The times of India (1861-current).

Collection of newspapers produced by and/or for service members during and immediately after World War II (1939-1948), featuring titles from the major theatres, for both Allied and Axis forces.

The South Asia Archive is a fully searchable digital archive encompassing millions of pages of valuable research and teaching materials, providing online access to documents ranging from 1700 through to 1953. The Archive covers the Indian subcontinent, including India, Pakistan, Burma, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh, and contains both serial and non-serial materials, including reports, rare books, and journal runs from noteworthy, rare publications. The documents in the Archive are interdisciplinary, reflecting the varied range of knowledge production in colonial and early post-colonial India in fields such as culture & society, industry & economy, science, technology & medicine, urban planning & administration, and politics & law. Most of the material is in English, about 30% of the documents are in vernacular languages, including Bengali and Sanskrit. Comprising material sourced from collectors and archivists in India by the South Asia Research Foundation (SARF), this Archive brings together a wealth of content relevant to both teaching and research.

"Women and social movements in modern empires since 1820 explores prominent themes in world history since 1820: conquest, colonization, settlement, resistance, and post-coloniality, as told through women's voices. With a clear focus on bringing the voices of the colonized to the forefront, this highly-curated archive and database includes documents related to the Habsburg Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the British, French, Italian, Dutch, Russian, Japanese, and United States Empires, and settler societies in the United States, New Zealand and Australia."