Imperialism and Colonialism: Christopher Bayly, Richard Rathbone and Richard Drayton

Imperialism and Colonialism: Christopher Bayly, Richard Rathbone and Richard Drayton is a collection of interviews that are being published as a book for the first time. These interviews have been conducted by one of England’s leading social anthropologists and historians, Professor Alan Macfarlane. Filmed over a period of several years, the three conversations in this volume are part of the series Creative Lives and Works. These transcriptions form a part of a larger set of interviews that cut across various disciplines, from the social sciences and the sciences to the performing and visual arts. The current volume is on three foremost imperial and global historians. Colonialism is intrinsically linked to its imperial past. Christopher Bayly, Richard Rathbone and Richard Drayton, come alive through these conversations in this book. They offer a refreshing perspective to the actions of the colonizer and the colonized, often deriding the actions of the former. Bayly talks at great length about his Indian experience, Rathbone talks about the tempered indifference of the larger academic community towards African history and its oral tradition and Drayton engages his readers with anecdotes and interesting insights into Creole culture. The book will be of enormous value not just to those interested in the subject of History, Culture Studies, Ethnography and Comparative Studies and Literature but also to the uninitiated because of the lucidity which conversations bring to even otherwise opaque discussions.Please note: This title is co-published with Social Science Press, New Delhi. Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

About the Author

Alan Macfarlane was born in Shillong, India, in 1941 and educated at the Dragon School, Sedbergh School, Oxford and London Universities where he received two Master’s degrees and two doctorates. He is the author of over forty books, including The Origins of English Individualism (1978) and Letters to Lily: On How the World Works (2005). He has worked in England, Nepal, Japan and China as both an historian and anthropologist. He was elected to the British Academy in 1986 and is now Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and a Life Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. Professor Macfarlane received the Huxley Memorial Medal, the highest honour of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 2012.