'Edge of Empire': Skirmishes of Empire
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/09/books/review/09mazower.html
By MARK MAZOWER
Published: October 9, 2005
"Detriments you call us?" Michael Caine's Peachy Carnehan expostulates
in "The Man Who Would be King." "Detriments? Well I want to remind you
that it was detriments like us that built this bloody Empire." John
Huston's 1975 film version of Rudyard Kipling's story stripped away the
pretensions of the British ruling elite and depicted India as a magnet
for men on the make, a lawless land where the adventurer could throw
off the class-bound shackles of his old identity and acquire wealth,
respect, maybe even divinity. This is much like the picture of empire
that emerges from Maya Jasanoff's spirited, teeming book. Even though
he is not exactly an unknown figure - his own self-marketing skills saw
to that - one can never get enough of the Great Belzoni, 6-foot-8 and
an early plunderer and publicist of Egyptian antiquities, or of the
hookah-smoking Swiss mercenary "Colonel" Antoine Polier, who flourished
in Mogul Awadh and amassed a vast collection of rare manuscripts there
before meeting an unhappy fate in Europe, stabbed and shot to death by
bandits during the French Revolution. Jasanoff, an assistant professor
of history at the University of Virginia, proposes that collecting out
on the borders of empire was a way for such men to haul themselves up
the greasy pole and remake themselves as cultivated members of polite
society back home.
EDGE OF EMPIRE
Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850.
By Maya Jasanoff.
Illustrated. 401 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95.
Maya Jasanoff
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.atheism/msg/153c8d9a41a2c2fc
Imperialism
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.atheism/msg/5caa8368cb2e7b29
Colonialism
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.atheism/msg/4949801e8849003c
Mercantilism
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.atheism/msg/e296917366a7c7dc
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