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“... On the outskirts of most Indian cities you still encounter the war graves of imperialism: the melancholy, unvisited Christian cemeteries which contain the serried ranks of monuments commemorating British subjects and their children buried there during the days of the Raj. Perhaps it is not surprising, or particularly shocking, that it was fear for European rather than Indian lives which drove the growth of tropical medicine in India ...”

“... If, around 1880, an educated person in Britain had been asked to list the most important intellectuals of the previous generation, he or she might well have mentioned, alongside Darwin and John Stuart Mill, the name of Sir Henry Maine, the subject of Karuna Mantena’s valuable new study. His name isn’t heard much anymore, but in his own day Maine (1822-88) was regarded as a towering public intellectual ...”

“... historical response to Fukuyama and Huntington might run. For, though it ends in 1914, Chris Bayly’s erudite and engrossing account of the global birthpangs of modernity is not only a landmark contribution to historical literature but, indirectly and without a hint of overt engagement, a pertinent addition to contemporary debates about globalisation ...”

“... that refurbishment was a new concentration on imperial aggrandisement and imperial ideology. C.A. Bayly’s Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World 1780-1830 is the first detailed study of how the British reconstructed their empire after the loss of the American colonies since Vincent Harlow’s much longer, yet less ambitious, The Founding of the ...”

“... this. ‘The end of empire is not a pretty thing if examined too closely,’ as Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper put it in their two-volume history of Britain’s colonial wars in India and South-East Asia from the 1940s to 1963, which forms the perfect complement to Hyam’s work.* It was clearly not as pretty as that ‘great ship goes down’ image ...”

“... works produced on global history in recent years, The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914 by C.A. Bayly and Jürgen Osterhammel’s Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (soon to be available in English translation), were both written by scholars based in Europe. Yet in general, on the basis of my own experience, Peter Baldwin – an ...”

“... On 22 February 1854, James Buchanan, then the American ambassador in London but soon to be president of the US, celebrated George Washington’s birthday with a dinner to which Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi were invited. At Mazzini’s request other leading revolutionaries were present: Kossuth (Hungary), Worcell (Poland), Ruge (Germany), Herzen (Russia) and Ledru-Rollin (France ...”

“... the 18th century, Raja Ram Mohun Roy, a Bengali scholar, had made the leap, as the historian C.A. Bayly has pointed out, from being a ‘late Mughal state intellectual’ to the ‘first Indian liberal’. Roy’s legacy is evident in the religious, social and intellectual reforms in 19th-century Bengal; by the 1860s, Bengalis were not only producing a canon ...”

“... yet neither writer can explain why these issues are so neglected in the earlier volumes. C.A. Bayly, the Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at Cambridge, dismisses as ‘fashionable’ or ‘anachronistic’ issues that have agitated Imperial historians for the past twenty years – famine and ecology, for example; the destruction of ...”

“... and Medicaid had to be cut drastically in order to build more foreign outposts for jodhpur-clad Americans. But Americans, it turned out, were not rushing to Abercrombie & Fitch to equip themselves for life in the tropics. Some zealous young Republicans in Baghdad’s Green Zone were busy dismantling the Iraqi state, but they clearly did not impress ...”

“... industrialists like the Tata family were repeatedly baulked from setting up steel mills or digging coal mines. In the British view, India’s destiny was to remain what Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson called in Why Nations Fail (2012) an ‘extractive colony’. The Raj was seen at its worst in the hardest times, responding to poor harvests and the resulting ...”