Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

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A Galaxy of Immortal Women: The Yin Side of Chinese Civilization
Griffith, Brian
ForeWord Reviews Mother’s Day Staff Pick: “Books Mom Will Love”“A valuable historical reference guide.”
—Publishers Weekly“This is a very ambitious and timely book, a book that many historians, literary theorists, and storytellers who care about China and its “Other Half of the Sky” want to write, but Brian Griffith did it first, with such scope, ease and fun.”
—WANG PING, author of The Last Communist Virgin and Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China“This book is a most engaging and entertaining read, and the depth of its scholarship is astounding. Griffith vividly describes the counterculture of Chinese goddesses, shows that their fascinating stories are alive and active today, and points us toward a more inclusive and caring partnership future.”
—RIANE EISLER, author of The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics and The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our FutureTouching on the whole story of China—from Neolithic villages to a globalized Shanghai—this book ties mythology, archaeology, history, religion, folklore, literature, and journalism into a millennia-spanning story about how Chinese women—and their goddess traditions—fostered a counterculture that flourishes and grows stronger every day. As Brian Griffith charts the stories of China’s founding mothers, shamanesses, goddesses, and ordinary heroines, he also explores the largely untold story of women’s contributions to cultural life in the world’s biggest society and provides inspiration for all global citizens. Brian Griffith grew up in Texas, studied history at the University of Alberta, and now lives just outside of Toronto, Ontario. He is an independent historian who examines how cultural history influences our lives, and how collective experience offers insights into our future.
I might add that Chinese women still contribute to their governance. Few people understand the Yin side of Chinese society.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

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Wealth and Power: China's Long March to the Twenty-first Century
Orville Schell, John Delury

Through a series of lively and absorbing portraits of iconic modern Chinese leaders and thinkers, two of today’s foremost specialists on China provide a panoramic narrative of this country’s rise to preeminence that is at once analytical and personal. How did a nation, after a long and painful period of dynastic decline, intellectual upheaval, foreign occupation, civil war, and revolution, manage to burst forth onto the world stage with such an impressive run of hyperdevelopment and wealth creation—culminating in the extraordinary dynamism of China today?

Wealth and Power answers this question by examining the lives of eleven influential officials, writers, activists, and leaders whose contributions helped create modern China. This fascinating survey begins in the lead-up to the first Opium War with Wei Yuan, the nineteenth-century scholar and reformer who was one of the first to urge China to borrow ideas from the West. It concludes in our time with human-rights advocate and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, an outspoken opponent of single-party rule. Along the way, we meet such titans of Chinese history as the Empress Dowager Cixi, public intellectuals Feng Guifen, Liang Qichao, and Chen Duxiu, Nationalist stalwarts Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek, and Communist Party leaders Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Zhu Rongji.

The common goal that unites all of these disparate figures is their determined pursuit of fuqiang, “wealth and power.” This abiding quest for a restoration of national greatness in the face of a “century of humiliation” at the hands of the Great Powers came to define the modern Chinese character. It’s what drove both Mao and Deng to embark on root-and-branch transformations of Chinese society, first by means of Marxism-Leninism, then by authoritarian capitalism. And this determined quest remains the key to understanding many of China’s actions today.

By unwrapping the intellectual antecedents of today’s resurgent China, Orville Schell and John Delury supply much-needed insight into the country’s tortured progression from nineteenth-century decline to twenty-first-century boom. By looking backward into the past to understand forces at work for hundreds of years, they help us understand China today and the future that this singular country is helping shape for all of us.
Orville Schell is one of the foremost US scholars on China. He has written books since the late 1960s even as a graduate student that help understand China. With Frank Schurman, he wrote the China Reader which describes China in 18-19th centuries.
I will post in the New China thread also.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

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Mastering the art of war
Liang, Zhuge, Ji, Liu

"Composed by two prominent statesmen-generals of classical China, this book develops the strategies of Sun Tzu's classic, The Art of War, into a complete handbook of organization and leadership. The great leaders of ancient China who were trained in Sun Tzu's principles understood how war is waged successfully, both materially and mentally, and how victory and defeat follow clear social, psychological, and environmental laws. Drawing on episodes from the panorama of Chinese history, Mastering the Art of War presents practical summaries of these essential laws along with tales of conflict and strategy that show in concrete terms the proper use of Sun Tzu's principles. The book also examines the social and psychological aspects of organization and crisis management. The translator's introduction surveys the Chinese philosophies of war and conflict and explores in depth the parallels between The Art of War and the oldest handbook of strategic living, the I Ching (Book of Changes)."--Jacket.


Translated by Thomas Cleary
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Eccentric Culture - Theory of Western Civilization
Remi Brague

Western culture, which influenced the whole world, came from Europe. But its roots are not there. They are in Athens and Jerusalem. European culture takes its bearing from references that are not in Europe: Europe is eccentric.What makes the West unique? What is the driving force behind its culture? Remi Brague takes up these questions in Eccentric Culture. This is not another dictionary of European culture, nor a measure of the contributions of a particular individual, religion, or national tradition. The author's interest is especially, with regard to the transmission of that culture, to articulate the dynamic tension that has propelled Europe and more generally the West toward civilization. It is this mainspring of European culture, this founding principle, that Brague calls "Roman".

Yet the author's intent is not to write a history of Europe, and less yet to defend the historical reality of the Roman Empire. Brague rather isolates and generalizes one aspect of that history or, one might say, cultural myth, of ancient Rome. The Roman attitude senses its own incompleteness and recognizes the call to borrow from what went before it.

Historically, it has led the West to borrow from the great traditions of Jerusalem and Athens: primarily the Jewish and Christian tradition, on the one hand, and the classical Greek tradition on the other.
Nowhere does the author find this Roman character so strongly present as in the Christian and particularly Catholic attitude toward the incarnation.

At once an appreciation of the richness and diversity of the sources and their fruit, Eccentric Culture points as well to the fragility of their nourishing principle. As such, Brague finds in it not only a means of understanding the past, but of projecting a future in (re)proposing to the West, and to Europe in particular, a model relationship of what is proper to it.

An international bestseller (translated from the original French edition of Europe, La Voie Romaine), this work has been or is presently being translated into thirteen languages.
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Imponderable but Not Inevitable: Warfare in the 20th Century (Praeger Security International)
Malcolm H. Murfett

By definition, the unforeseeable cannot be seen, but one way to bring more variables under consideration when planning a military action is to review those instances where the unforeseeable changed everything. For professionals and enthusiasts alike, Imponderable But Not Inevitable: Warfare in the 20th Century does just that, reviewing specific instances in 20th-century warfare when things did not go according to plan.Imponderable but Not Inevitable uses case studies to expose the "Inevitability Syndrome," exploring the role of luck, fate, and randomness in influencing both victory and defeat. In essays drawn from World War II, Konfrontasi, the Vietnam War, and the Gulf War, a distinguished set of military experts looks at real scenarios of inexplicable losses, illustrating why nothing—nothing—should be taken for granted in war.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

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Struggle for the Middle Sea: The Great Navies at War in the Mediterranean Theater, 1940 - 1945
Vincent P. O'Hara
The Mediterranean Sea is the maritime crossroads where Europe, Asia and Africa meet. It was the most intensely contested body of water in World War II. More major naval actions were fought in the Mediterranean than in the Atlantic or Pacific. Its waters witnessed carrier strikes, battle-line shootouts, cruiser-destroyer engagements, convoy attacks, coastal actions, amphibious assaults, and bitter submarine campaigns. Despite the importance of the Mediterranean war, however, its recent literature is remarkably sparse and largely one-sided. The Struggle in the Middle Sea is a fresh study of the Mediterranean naval war. It analyses the actions and performances of each of the five major navies, the British, Italian, French, German, and American within a chronological, operational narrative of the entire five year campaign, and examines, without partisanship, the national imperatives that drove much of the action. The Struggle in the Middle Sea sidesteps the myths that haunt this campaign, like Great Britain enjoyed a moral advantage over Italy, or the French were Germans puppets, or the North African campaign contributed to the eventual Allied victory. The book documents how the British Royal Navy, despite brilliant victories, was bled white in a campaign with questionable strategic goals; how Italy followed its own coherent naval strategy, much to the frustration of its German ally; how the Marine Nationale was the strength of the independent French state and how it fought the Allies--and rejected the Axis--to maintain that independence. Finally, while the book concentrates on the 1940 to 1943 period, it also covers Germany's improvised and remarkably successful fighting withdrawal at sea from 1943-1945.
The myth of the North African campaign was promoted by Churchill in his history of WWII.
I struggled to understand how this did anything to main war in European land mass.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

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Question of India and the Transformation of Geopolitics in Qing China
Matthew Mosca
Between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, Qing rulers, officials, and scholars fused diverse, fragmented perceptions of foreign territory into one integrated worldview. In the same period, a single "foreign" policy emerged as an alternative to the many localized "frontier" policies hitherto pursued on the coast, in Xinjiang, and in Tibet. By unraveling Chinese, Manchu, and British sources to reveal the information networks used by the Qing empire to gather intelligence about its emerging rival, British India, this book explores China's altered understanding of its place in a global context. Far from being hobbled by a Sinocentric worldview, Qing China's officials and scholars paid close attention to foreign affairs. To meet the growing British threat, they adapted institutional practices and geopolitical assumptions to coordinate a response across their maritime and inland borderlands. In time, the new and more active response to Western imperialism built on this foundation reshaped not only China's diplomacy but also the internal relationship between Beijing and its frontiers.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

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A History of Eastern Europe 1740-1918: Empires, Nations and Modernisation
Ian D. Armour
"A History of Eastern Europe 1740-1918: Empires, Nations and Modernisation" provides a comprehensive, authoritative account of the region during a troubled period that finished with the First World War. Ian Armour focuses on the three major themes that have defined Eastern Europe in the modern period - empire, nationhood and modernisation - whilst chronologically tracing the emergence of Eastern Europe as a distinct concept and place. Detailed coverage is given to the Habsburg, Ottoman, German and Russian Empires that struggled for dominance during this time.
In this exciting new edition, Ian Armour incorporates findings from new research into the nature and origins of nationalism and the attempts of supranational states to generate dynastic loyalties as well as concepts of empire. Armour's insightful guide to early Eastern Europe considers the important figures and governments, analyses the significant events and discusses the socio-economic and cultural developments that are crucial to a rounded understanding of the region in that era.
I submit Ukraine is a reversion to that era.
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China’s Crony Capitalism: The Dynamics of Regime Decay
Minxin Pei

When Deng Xiaoping launched China on the path to economic reform in the late 1970s, he vowed to build “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” More than three decades later, China’s efforts to modernize have yielded something very different from the working people’s paradise Deng envisioned: an incipient kleptocracy, characterized by endemic corruption, soaring income inequality, and growing social tensions. China’s Crony Capitalism traces the origins of China’s present-day troubles to the series of incomplete reforms from the post-Tiananmen era that decentralized the control of public property without clarifying its ownership.

Beginning in the 1990s, changes in the control and ownership rights of state-owned assets allowed well-connected government officials and businessmen to amass huge fortunes through the systematic looting of state-owned property―in particular land, natural resources, and assets in state-run enterprises. Mustering compelling evidence from over two hundred corruption cases involving government and law enforcement officials, private businessmen, and organized crime members, Minxin Pei shows how collusion among elites has spawned an illicit market for power inside the party-state, in which bribes and official appointments are surreptitiously but routinely traded. This system of crony capitalism has created a legacy of criminality and entrenched privilege that will make any movement toward democracy difficult and disorderly.

Rejecting conventional platitudes about the resilience of Chinese Communist Party rule, Pei gathers unambiguous evidence that beneath China’s facade of ever-expanding prosperity and power lies a Leninist state in an advanced stage of decay.
Shows how XJP anti-corruption drive and "Marxism with Sinic characteristics" are a return to Deng's Sixth Revolution.
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Making China Modern: From the Great Qing to Xi Jinping
Klaus Mühlhahn


It is tempting to attribute China’s recent ascendance to changes in political leadership and economic policy. Making China Modern teaches otherwise. Moving beyond the standard framework of Cold War competition and national resurgence, Klaus Mühlhahn situates twenty-first-century China in the nation’s long history of creative adaptation.

In the mid-eighteenth century, when the Qing Empire reached the height of its power, China dominated a third of the world’s population and managed its largest economy. But as the Opium Wars threatened the nation’s sovereignty from without and the Taiping Rebellion ripped apart its social fabric from within, China found itself verging on free fall. A network of family relations, economic interdependence, institutional innovation, and structures of governance allowed citizens to regain their footing in a convulsing world. In China’s drive to reclaim regional centrality, its leaders looked outward as well as inward, at industrial developments and international markets offering new ways to thrive.


This dynamic legacy of overcoming adversity and weakness is apparent today in China’s triumphs―but also in its most worrisome trends. Telling a story of crisis and recovery, Making China Modern explores the versatility and resourcefulness that matters most to China’s survival, and to its future possibilities.
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Red Flags: Why Xi’s China Is in Jeopardy
George Magnus

A trusted economic commentator provides a penetrating account of the threats to China's continued economic rise

Under President Xi Jinping, China has become a large and confident power both at home and abroad, but the country also faces serious challenges. In this critical take on China’s future, economist George Magnus explores four key traps that China must confront and overcome in order to thrive: debt, middle income, the Renminbi, and an aging population. Looking at the political direction President Xi Jinping is taking, Magnus argues that Xi’s authoritarian and repressive philosophy is ultimately not compatible with the country’s economic aspirations.

Thorough and well researched, the book also investigates the potential for conflicts over trade, China’s evolving relationship with Trump, and the country’s attempt to win influence and control in Eurasia through the Belt and Road initiative.
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Getting China Wrong
Aaron L. Friedberg

The West’s strategy of engagement with China has failed. More than three decades of trade and investment with the advanced democracies have left that country far richer and stronger than it would otherwise have been. But growth and development have not caused China’s rulers to relax their grip on political power, abandon their mercantilist economic policies, or accept the rules and norms of the existing international system. To the contrary: China today is more repressive at home, more aggressive abroad, and more obviously intent on establishing itself as the world’s preponderant power than at any time since the death of Chairman Mao. What went wrong? Put simply, the democracies underestimated the resilience, resourcefulness, and ruthlessness of the Chinese Communist Party. For far too long, the United States and its allies failed to take seriously the Party’s unwavering determination to crush opposition, build national power, and fulfill its ideological and geopolitical ambitions. In this timely and powerfully argued study, Aaron Friedberg identifies the assumptions underpinning engagement, describes the counterstrategy that China’s Communist Party rulers devised in order to exploit the West’s openness while defeating its plans, and explains what the democracies must do now if they wish to preserve their prosperity, protect their security, and defend their common values.
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Wronged by Empire: Post-Imperial Ideology and Foreign Policy in India and China
Manjari Miller

Although India and China have very different experiences of colonialism, they respond to that history in a similar way—by treating it as a collective trauma. As a result they have a strong sense of victimization that affects their foreign policy decisions even today.

Wronged by Empire breaks new ground by blending this historical phenomenon, colonialism, with mixed methods—including archival research, newspaper data mining, and a new statistical method of content analysis—to explain the foreign policy choices of India and China: two countries that are continuously discussed but very rarely rigorously compared. By reference to their colonial past, Manjari Chatterjee Miller explains their puzzling behavior today. More broadly, she argues that the transformative historical experience of a large category of actors—ex-colonies, who have previously been neglected in the study of international relations—can be used as a method to categorize states in the international system. In the process Miller offers a more inclusive way to analyze states than do traditional theories of international relations.
China had a Century of Humiliation (COH)
India had a Millenium of Humiliation (MOH)
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India and China: Beyond the Binary of Friendship and Enmity
B. R. Deepak
This book examines the changing dynamics of the issues between India and China in the wake of extensive globalisation, economic slowdown, the trade wars, Covid 19, Galwan and the undercurrents in the emerging new global order. Providing a comprehensive overview of India–China relationship and the role of the USA in the context of India’s economic and security cooperation in the region, it argues that India–China relations are too complex to be defined through the binary of friendship and enmity, since it includes an element of cooperation, competition, coordination and as well as conflict and confrontation. The book also opens new avenues for research. As such it is of interest to researchers and students of Asian studies, Asian history, China studies, peace and conflict studies and international relations.
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India and China in the Colonial World
Madhavi Thampi (editor)

India and China in the Colonial World brings together thirteen essays by eminent Indian and Chinese scholars as well as young researchers who look at the multidimensional interaction between the two countries. This interaction was of many kinds and took place at various levels. This volume casts new light on some of the problems that have confronted the relations between India and China as new states and, in doing so, challenges stereotyped images of this relationship. The major areas of India-China relationships covered in this book include some aspects of the situation during and after World War II. Some papers, such as those on the importance of Shanghai in Sino-Indian trade, the presence of the Chinese community in India and Indians in China; Indian fighters in the Taiping Rebellion; Gandhi and the Chinese in South Africa; and ties between south-west China and north-east India during World War II; present the findings of new research. Others such as those pertaining to India-China relations in the period, such as the opium trade; the controversial visit of Rabindranath Tagore to China; and the complexity of Subhash Chandra Bose’s position with relation to both China and Japan have been put in a new light. The essays in this book are particularly relevant as they help to understand the relationship between India and China in the context of a historical perspective.
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Valuable insights in light of the Nupur Sharma incident

Precision in the Global War on Terror: Inciting Muslims through the War of Ideas
Sherifa Zuhur
Never before have Americans paid so much attention to Islam and Muslim ideology. Although efforts have been made to separate mainsteam views from extremist principles, Muslims feel that many of their basic beliefs are under attack in the ongoing war of ideas. The author explores why, surveying a broad swath of accusations and efforts to change Muslim and Islamist ideas and institutions.
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Post by Mukesh.Kumar »

The Chinese always mystify others from the broader world's outside.

Last few months have been focused into getting a toehold into the history of China, especially after reading of how the Chinese helped the VC in Vietnam.

The first book is historical. A short compendium of Chinese history over the past 3,500 odd years from tightly the time the Chinese started keeping written records. That's amazing considering that the rest of the world saw this level of administration only much later.

The Dynasties of China- Bamber Gasoigne
Image

Key takeaways from the book other than a short history of the key ten dynasties who ruled China are insights into the development of the language, the schools of thought- Confucianism, Daoism and the Legal School ( maybe the earliest authoritarian guide book). How geography defines Chinese thought. While it would be foolhardy to say that read this book and you understand China, it's a good starting point.

To the world who look at China and say, " How odd. Why do they behave this way,?" The book offers nuggets of why and how centuries of tradition and thought process culminate into what is modern China. Just like in times of crisis we look to our childhood stories, history, it's the Dane with China.

I would contend that even the repressive Chinese Communist party leaders looked to history and the Classics. Therein the idea of Communism with Chinese characteristics.
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The second book in the series was Mao- The Unknown Story- Jung Chang and Jon Halliday

Image

It seemed that I was reading 1984 once again.

Traces the life of Mao from his early years, entry into politics, slow movement into the CCP, contrary to what I had believed, Mao was not about Communism but about capturing power.

Reading on you understand the myth about the Long March, how Mao's psychopathic nature emerged as he played factions and was focused on capturing power, his troubled relationship with Stalin, why initially the Soviets supported him, his later cast and mouse game with Stalin and his pursuit of the Bomb and Superpower status. His successes and failures in spreading Maoist thought worldwide. His strange relationship with Chou. The fallout with USSR and the rapprochement with the US. In the footnotes you find how international horse trade based on incomplete knowledge and understanding caused crisis and breakouts. The economic justification of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

It's a very compelling read. Interesting if someone wants to understand modern China.

Highly recommended
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Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert's Secret State Intelligence System (Cultures of Knowledge in the Early Modern World)
by Jacob Soll


"Colbert has long been celebrated as Louis XIV's minister of finance, trade, and industry. More recently, he has been viewed as his minister of culture and propaganda. In this lively and persuasive book, Jake Soll has given us a third Colbert, the information manager."---Peter Burke, University of Cambridge"

Jacob Soll gives us a road map drawn from the French state under Colbert. With stunning attention to detail, Colbert used knowledge in the service of enhancing royal power. Jacob Soll's scholarship is impeccable and his story long overdue and compelling."---Margaret Jacob, University of California, Los Angeles" Nowadays we all know that information is the key to power, and that the masters of information rule the world. Jacob Soll teaches us that Jean-Baptiste Colbert had grasped this principle three and a half centuries ago, and used it to construct a new kind of state. This imaginative, erudite, and powerfully written book re-creates the history of libraries and archives in early modern Europe, and ties them in a novel and convincing way to the new statecraft of Europe's absolute monarchs."---Anthony Grafton, Princeton University"

Brilliantly researched, superbly told, and timely, Soll's story is crucial for the history of the modern state."---Keith Baker, Stanford University.

When Louis XIV asked his minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert---the man who was to oversee the building of Versailles and the Royal Academy of Sciences, as well as the navy, the Paris police force, and French industry---to build a large-scale administrative government, Colbert created an unprecedented information system for political power. In The Information Master, Jacob Soll shows how the legacy of Colbert's encyclopedic tradition lies at the very center of the rise of the modern state and was a precursor to industrial intelligence and Internet search engines. Soll's innovative look at Colbert's rise to power argues that his practice of collecting knowledge originated from techniques of church scholarship and from Renaissance Italy, where merchants recognized the power to be gained from merging scholarship, finance, and library science. With his connection of interdisciplinary approaches---regarding accounting, state administration, archives, libraries, merchant techniques, ecclesiastical culture, policing, and humanist pedagogy---Soll has written an innovative book that will redefine not only the history of the reign of Louis XIV and information science but also the study of political and economic history.

Jacob Soll is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University and the author of Publishing The Prince: History, Reading, and the Birth of Political Criticism (University of Michigan Press, 2005), and winner of the 2005 Jacques Barzun Prize from the American Philosophical Society and a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship. Soll edited a special issue of Journal of the History of Ideas titled "The Uses of Historical Evidence in Early Modern Europe"; has cofounded the online journal Republics of Letters; and is editor, along with Anthony Grafton and Ann Blair, of the series Cultures of Knowledge in the Early Modern World.

Jacket illustration: Jean Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683), Philippe de Champaigne, 1655, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Wildenstein Foundation, Inc., 1951 (51.34). Photograph © 2003 The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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China and Cybersecurity: Espionage, Strategy, and Politics in the Digital Domain
Jon R. Lindsay, Tai Ming Cheung, Derek S. Reveron

China's emergence as a great power in the twenty-first century is strongly enabled by cyberspace. Leveraged information technology integrates Chinese firms into the global economy, modernizes infrastructure, and increases internet penetration which helps boost export-led growth. China's pursuit of "informatization" reconstructs industrial sectors and solidifies the transformation of the Chinese People's Liberation Army into a formidable regional power. Even as the government censors content online, China has one of the fastest growing internet populations and most of the technology is created and used by civilians.

Western political discourse on cybersecurity is dominated by news of Chinese military development of cyberwarfare capabilities and cyber exploitation against foreign governments, corporations, and non-governmental organizations. Western accounts, however, tell only one side of the story. Chinese leaders are also concerned with cyber insecurity, and Chinese authors frequently note that China is also a victim of foreign cyber -- attacks -- predominantly from the United States.

China and Cybersecurity: Espionage, Strategy, and Politics in the Digital Domain is a comprehensive analysis of China's cyberspace threats and policies. The contributors -- Chinese specialists in cyber dynamics, experts on China, and experts on the use of information technology between China and the West -- address cyberspace threats and policies, emphasizing the vantage points of China and the U.S. on cyber exploitation and the possibilities for more positive coordination with the West. The volume's multi-disciplinary, cross-cultural approach does not pretend to offer wholesale resolutions. Contributors take different stances on how problems may be analyzed and reduced and aim to inform the international audience of how China's political, economic, and security systems shape cyber activities. The compilation provides empirical and evaluative depth on the deepening dependence on shared global information infrastructure and the growing willingness to exploit it for political or economic gain.
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Pakistan: At the Helm
Tilak Devasher
Fascinating vignettes about the men and woman who ruled Pakistan What did Muhammad Ali Jinnah say when he received a royal salute from the last British regiment about to leave Pakistan? Did Ayub Khan consider turning Pakistan into a monarchy? Why was Yahya Khan so confident that the 1970 elections would return a hung parliament? What did Zulfikar Ali Bhutto say when the Pakistan Army launched a brutal crackdown in March 1971? How did Zia-ul-Haq get Bhutto to appoint him the army chief? In 2007, did Benazir Bhutto misread the extent of American support for her return to Pakistan? Had Pervez Musharraf and Nawaz Sharif agreed to a pull-out from Kargil even before the latter went to meet President Clinton in July 1999? Backed by meticulous research, the second book from Tilak Devasher, author of Pakistan: Courting the Abyss, provides enthralling insights into the lives and times of the leaders of Pakistan over the seven decades of the nation s existence. Anecdotal and engrossing, Pakistan: At the Helm presents a human side to the country s political history for anyone who is curious about the inner workings of its corridors of power.
I gave a talk in November 2007 in Sunnyvale on "Understanding Pakistan". A three-hour pin drop presentation. In the end, someone asked me with all my knowledge what will be the fate of BB who had just returned to Pakistan.
I said most likely she will be assassinated for its against their Islamist grain to have a woman President. Pakistan is more Islamist in 2007 than two decades earlier.
Sure enough, she got killed.
A reporter in a local paper printed my prediction came true!
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Sixteen Stormy Days
Tripurdaman Singh
Sixteen Stormy Days narrates the riveting story of the First
Amendment to the Constitution of India-one of the pivotal events in
Indian political and constitutional history, and its first great battle
of ideas. Passed in June 1951 in the face of tremendous opposition
within and outside Parliament, the subject of some of independent
India's fiercest parliamentary debates, the First Amendment drastically
curbed freedom of speech; enabled caste-based reservation by restricting
freedom against discrimination; circumscribed the right to property and
validated abolition of the zamindari system, and fashioned a special
schedule of unconstitutional laws immune to judicial challenge. Enacted
months before India's inaugural election, the amendment represents the
most profound changes that the Constitution has ever seen.
Faced with an
expansively liberal Constitution that stood in the way of nearly every
major socio-economic plan in the Congress party's manifesto, a judiciary
vigorously upholding civil liberties, and a press fiercely resisting
his attempt to control public discourse, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru
reasserted executive supremacy, creating the constitutional
architecture for repression and coercion.

What extraordinary set of events led the prime minister-who had championed the Constitution when
it was passed in 1950 after three years of deliberation-to radically amend it after a mere sixteen days of debate in 1951?


Drawing on parliamentary debates, press reports, judicial pronouncements, official correspondence and existing scholarship, Sixteen Stormy Days challenges conventional wisdom on iconic figures such as Jawaharlal Nehru, B.R.
Ambedkar, Rajendra Prasad, Sardar Patel and Shyama Prasad Mookerji, and
lays bare the vast gulf between the liberal promise of India's
Constitution and the authoritarian impulses of her first government.
Gandhiji was dead. So nothing stopped Nehru from his natural dynastic process.
ramana
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Devil-Land: England Under Siege, 1588-1688
Clare Jackson
Among foreign observers, seventeenth-century England was known as 'Devil-Land'- a diabolical country of fallen angels, torn apart by seditious rebellion, religious extremism, and royal collapse. Clare Jackson's dazzling, original account of English history's most turbulent and radical era tells the story of a nation in a state of near continual crisis. As an unmarried heretic with no heir, Elizabeth I was regarded with horror by Catholic Europe, while her Stuart successors, James I and Charles I, were seen as impecunious and incompetent, unable to manage their three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland. The traumatic civil wars, regicide, and a republican Commonwealth were followed by the floundering, foreign-leaning rule of Charles II and his brother, James II, before William of Orange invaded England with a Dutch army and a new order was imposed. Devil-Land reveals England as, in many ways, a 'failed state'- endemically unstable and rocked by devastating events from the Gunpowder Plot to the Great Fire of London. Catastrophe nevertheless bred creativity, and Jackson makes brilliant use of eyewitness accounts - many penned by stupefied foreigners - to dramatize her great story. Starting on the eve of the Spanish Armada's descent in 1588 and concluding with a not-so 'Glorious Revolution' a hundred years later, Devil-Land is a spectacular reinterpretation of England's vexed and enthralling past.
And in this Devil Land, the East India Company was founded.
Basically, a rapacious commercial entity to exploit foreign lands.
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Re: Books Folder - 2008 onwards!!!

Post by Vayutuvan »

ramana wrote:Devil-Land: England Under Siege, 1588-1688
Clare Jackson
...
And in this Devil Land, the East India Company was founded.
Basically, a rapacious commercial entity to exploit foreign lands.
After Cromwell was defeated and executed, King Charles II started the Royal Society.

From Wikipedia
Founded on 28 November 1660, it was granted a royal charter by King Charles II as The Royal Society.
There is a fascinating book called The Clockwork Universe which traces the history of the Royal Society. There is also an account of some of the nonsensical beliefs held and quackery engaged in by the member scientists well into the 18th century.
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Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji
Manu S. Pillai

Deftly and with great vividness, Manu S. Pillai takes us through 400 years of roiling history and returns the Deccan to the centre of our attention – where it belongs.’ SUNIL KHILNANI

‘Minutely researched and yet instantly accessible . . . Rebel Sultans will bring the fascinating history of the medieval Deccan to a whole new generation of readers.’ WILLIAM DALRYMPLE

‘In this lively study, Manu S. Pillai does a superb job of re-orienting the narrative of late medieval and early modern South Asia towards the Deccan.’ MUZAFFAR ALAM

‘In Rebel Sultans, the Deccan is presented in seven engaging chapters, each focused on a pivotal moment, character or symbol, that together trace the dynamic history of the region and convey its unique flavour.’ NAVINA NAJAT HAIDAR

In 1707 when Emperor Aurangzeb went to his grave, the Mughal empire began to crack into a hundred fractured pieces. It was the lure of the Deccan that drained this conqueror’s energies, putting him on a course of collision with his most threatening adversaries. After all, the Deccan was a land that inspired wonder. Its treasures were legendary, and its kings magnificent. It was a horizon of rousing adventure, attracting talent from beyond oceans. A traveller here could encounter bands of European snipers, available for military hire, or forbidding fortresses where African nobles scaled the heights of power. Diamonds and pearls lay heaped in the Deccan’s bazaars, while in its courts thrived Persians and Marathas, Portuguese and Georgians, presiding over a world of drama and betrayal. A thousand fortunes were made in the Deccan, drawing the formidable envy of generations of Mughal emperors.

In Rebel Sultans, Manu S. Pillai narrates the story of the Deccan from the close of the thirteenth century to the dawn of the eighteenth. Packed with riveting tales and compelling characters, this book takes us from the age of Alauddin Khilji to the ascent of Shivaji. We witness the dramatic rise and fall of the Vijayanagar empire, even as we negotiate intrigues at the courts of the Bahmani kings and the Rebel Sultans who overthrew them. From Chand Bibi, a valorous queen stabbed to death, and Ibrahim II of Bijapur, a Muslim prince who venerated Hindu gods, to Malik Ambar, the Ethiopian warlord, and Krishnadeva Raya on Vijayanagar’s Diamond Throne – they all appear in these pages as we journey through one of the most arresting sweeps of Indian history. Unraveling a forgotten chapter in our medieval past, Rebel Sultans reminds us of a different age and a different time in the Deccan – one that ended an empire and rewrote India’s destiny.
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I think Deccan is still the lure for Delhi. Even Samudragupta too!
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India, Bharat and Pakistan: The Constitutional Journey of a Sandwiched Civilisation
J. Sai Deepak
India, Bharat and Pakistan, the second book of the Bharat Trilogy, takes the discussion forward from its bestselling predecessor, India That Is Bharat. It explores the combined influence of European and Middle Eastern colonialities on Bharat as the successor state to the Indic civilisation, and on the origins of the Indian Constitution. To this end, the book traces the thought continuum of Middle Eastern coloniality, from the rise of Islamic Revivalism in the 1740s following the decline of the Mughal Empire, which presaged the idea of Pakistan, until the end of the Khilafat Movement in 1924, which cemented the road to Pakistan. The book also describes the collaboration of convenience that was forged between the proponents of Middle Eastern coloniality and the British colonial establishment to the detriment of the Indic civilisation.

One of the objectives of this book is to help the reader draw parallels between the challenges faced by the Indic civilisation in the tumultuous period from 1740 to 1924, and the present day. Its larger goal remains the same as that of the first, which is to enthuse Bharatiyas to undertake a critical decolonial study of Bharat's history, especially in the context of the Constitution, so that the religiosity towards the document is moderated by a sense of proportion, perspective and purpose.
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False Allies: India's Maharajahs In The Age Of Ravi Varma
Manu S. Pillai
India’s maharajahs have traditionally been cast as petty despots,
consumed by lust and luxury. Bejewelled parasites, they cared more, we
are told, for elephants and palaces than for schools and public works.
The British cheerfully circulated the idea that brown royalty needed
‘enlightened’ white hands to guide it, and by the twentieth century many
Indians too bought into the stereotype, viewing princely India as
packed with imperial stooges. Indeed, even today the princes are either
remembered with frothy nostalgia or dismissed as greedy fools, with no
role in the making of contemporary India.
In this brilliantly researched
book, Manu S. Pillai disputes this view. Tracking the travels of the
iconic painter Ravi Varma through five princely states – from the 1860s
to the early 1900s – he uncovers a picture far removed from the clichés
in which the princes are trapped. The world we discover is not of
dancing girls, but of sedition, legal battles, the defiance of imperial
dictates, and resistance. We meet maharajahs obsessed with
industrialization, and rulers who funded nationalists, these men
anything but pushovers for the Raj to manipulate. Outward deference
aside, the princes, Pillai shows, forever tested the Raj – from denying
white officials the right to wear shoes in durbars to trying to surpass
British administrative standards. Good governance became a spectacularly
subversive act, by which maharajahs and the ‘native statesmen’
assisting them refuted claims that Indians could not rule themselves.
For decades this made the princes heroes in the eyes of nationalists and
anti-colonial thinkers – a facet of history we have forgotten and
ignored.
By refocusing attention on princely India, False Allies takes
us on an unforgettable journey and reminds us that the maharajahs were
serious political actors – essential to knowing modern India.
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The Khalistan Conspiracy: A Former R&aw Officer Unravels The Path To 1984 - by G.B.S Sidhu (of R&AW).

The book neatly outlines how the Khalistan problem was created by the Congress gang at Akbar Road, New Delhi with a short term goal to cause rift between Shiromani Akali Dal and BJP. Which also led to a fight between Sikhs & Hindus who till then lived in perfect harmony. The shenanigans of the Congress party is explained in detail, and also how the Operation Blue Star was poorly planned. Book is available on Kindle as well.

Author notes: Soon after this, some sketchy details reached me about former chief minister Giani Zail Singh and Sanjay Gandhi trying to destabilize the Akali Dal-led coalition government by enlisting the support of Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale of Chowk Mehta gurudwara

According to Kuldip Nayar, Zail Singh himself telephoned Haryana chief minister Bhajan Lal and told him not to arrest Bhindranwale and not get involved in the case.

I remember as a child being taught the President of India was Gyani (knowledgable one) Zail Singh yada yada. How naive I was to believe that all these folks were good responsible people.

Harkishan Singh Surjeet said - "I want to tell you that if these political parties, for their narrow interests, allow these persons to poison the whole atmosphere, you cannot keep communal peace in the state.’". And for once I agree with a commie.
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The War of the Three Gods: Romans, Persians and the Rise of Islam
Peter Crawford

War of the Three Gods is a military history of the first half of seventh century, with heavy focus on the reign of the Eastern Roman Emperor Heraclius (AD 610-641). This was a pivotal time in world history as well as a dramatic one. The Eastern Roman Empire was brought to the very brink of extinction by the Sassanid Persians, before Heraclius managed to inflict a crushing defeat on the Sassanids with a desperate, final gambit. His conquests were short-lived, however, for the newly converted adherents of Islam burst upon the region, administering the coup de grace to Sassanid power and laying siege to Constantinople itself to usher in a new era.

Peter Crawford skillfully narrates the three-way struggle between the Christian Byzantine, Sassanid Persian and Islamic empires, a period peopled with fascinating characters, including Heraclius, Khusro II and the Prophet Muhammad himself. Many of the epic battles and sieges are described in as much detail as possible including Nineveh, Yarmouk, Qadisiyyah and Nihawand, Jerusalem and Constantinople. The strategies and tactics of these very different armies are discussed and analyzed, while maps allow the reader to place the events and follow the varying fortunes of the contending empires. This is an exciting and important study of a conflict that reshaped the map of the world.

Will comment after reading the book.
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Post by Cyrano »

J Sai Deepak's first book India that is Bharat was brilliant! I'm very eager to read the second book as soon as it's available on Kindle. Will buy the hardcover when I'm back in desh in Dec.
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The Challenge of Grand Strategy: The Great Powers and the Broken Balance between the World Wars
Edited by Jeffrey W. Taliaferro, Norrin M. Ripsman, Steven E. Lobel
The years between the world wars represent an era of broken balances: the retreat of the United States from global geopolitics, the weakening of Great Britain and France, Russian isolation following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the resurgence of German power in Europe, and the rise of Japan in East Asia. All these factors complicated great-power politics. This book brings together historians and political scientists to revisit the conventional wisdom on the grand strategies pursued between the world wars, drawing on theoretical innovations and new primary sources. The contributors suggest that all the great powers pursued policies that, while in retrospect suboptimal, represented conscious, rational attempts to secure their national interests under conditions of extreme uncertainty and intense domestic and international political, economic, and strategic constraints.
Looks like the same we are seeing in the current decade.
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The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Haidt
Something is going wrong on many college campuses in the last few years. Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide are rising. Speakers are shouted down. Students and professors say they are walking on eggshells and afraid to speak honestly. How did this happen?

First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt show how the new problems on campus have their origins in three terrible ideas that have become increasingly woven into American childhood and education: what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths are incompatible with basic psychological principles, as well as ancient wisdom from many cultures. They interfere with healthy development. Anyone who embraces these untruths—and the resulting culture of safetyism—is less likely to become an autonomous adult able to navigate the bumpy road of life.

Lukianoff and Haidt investigate the many social trends that have intersected to produce these untruths. They situate the conflicts on campus in the context of America’s rapidly rising political polarization, including a rise in hate crimes and off-campus provocation. They explore changes in childhood including the rise of fearful parenting, the decline of unsupervised play, and the new world of social media that has engulfed teenagers in the last decade.

This is a book for anyone who is confused by what is happening on college campuses today, or has children, or is concerned about the growing inability of Americans to live, work, and cooperate across party lines.
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The Age of Wrath: A History of the Delhi Sultanate
Abraham Eraly
The Delhi Sultanate period (1206-1526) is commonly portrayed as an age of chaos and violence of rapacious, plundering kings, turbulent dynasties, and the aggressive imposition of Islam on India. But it was also the era that saw the creation of a pan-Indian empire, on the foundations of which the Mughals and the British later built their own Indian empires. The encounter between Islam and Hinduism also transformed, among other things, India's architecture, literature, music and food.

Abraham Eraly brings this fascinating period vividly alive, portraying the many kings mad, brilliant, astute, cruel who ruled during this period, and discussing the political, social, and cultural developments that transformed India. Combining erudition with powerful storytelling, and analysis with anecdote, The Age of Wrath is a superb book.
Five hundred years of mayhem. It is our own Dark Age.
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War by Other Means: Geoeconomics and Statecraft Paperback – October 23, 2017
by Ambassador Robert D. Blackwill (Author), Jennifer M. Harris (Author)

Today, nations increasingly carry out geopolitical combat through economic means. Policies governing everything from trade and investment to energy and exchange rates are wielded as tools to win diplomatic allies, punish adversaries, and coerce those in between. Not so in the United States, however. America still too often reaches for the gun over the purse to advance its interests abroad. The result is a playing field sharply tilting against the United States.

“Geoeconomics, the use of economic instruments to advance foreign policy goals, has long been a staple of great-power politics. In this impressive policy manifesto, Blackwill and Harris argue that in recent decades, the United States has tended to neglect this form of statecraft, while China, Russia, and other illiberal states have increasingly employed it to Washington’s disadvantage.”
―G. John Ikenberry, Foreign Affairs

“A readable and lucid primer…The book defines the extensive topic and opens readers’ eyes to its prevalence throughout history…[Presidential] candidates who care more about protecting American interests would be wise to heed the advice of War by Other Means and take our geoeconomic toolkit more seriously.
―Jordan Schneider, Weekly Standard
Seems like a joke as US has been waving sanctions like a magic danda!
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Great State: China and the World
Timothy Brook
The world-renowned scholar and author of Vermeer’s Hat does for China what Mary Beard did for Rome in SPQR: Timothy Brook analyzes the last eight centuries of China’s relationship with the world in this magnificent history that brings together accounts from civil servants, horse traders, spiritual leaders, explorers, pirates, emperors, migrant workers, invaders, visionaries, and traitors—creating a multifaceted portrait of this highly misunderstood nation.

China is one of the oldest states in the world. It achieved its approximate current borders with the Ascendancy of the Yuan dynasty in the thirteenth century, and despite the passing of one Imperial dynasty to the next, has maintained them for eight centuries since. China remained China through the Ming, the Qing, the Republic, the Occupation, and Communism. But despite the desires of some of the most powerful people in the Great State through the ages, China has never been alone in the world. It has had to contend with invaders as well as foreign traders and imperialists. Its rulers for the majority of the last eight centuries have not been Chinese.

China became a mega-state not by conquering others, Timothy Cook contends, but rather by being conquered by others and then claiming right of succession to the empires of those Great States. What the Mongols and Manchu ruling families wrought, the Chinese ruling families of the Ming, the Republic, and the People’s Republic, have perpetuated. Yet a contemporary Chinese idea of a ‘fatherland’ that is, and always has been, completely and naturally Chinese persists. Brook argues that China, like everywhere, is the outcome of history, and like every state, rests on its capacities to conquer and suppress.
In The Great State, Brook examines China’s relationship with the world at large for the first time, from the Yuan through to the present, by following the stories of ordinary and extraordinary people navigating the spaces where China met, and continues to meet, the world.
The Great State includes black-and-white photos throughout.
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THE IMPERISHABLE SEED: How Hindu Mathematics Changed the World and Why this History was Erased
by Bhaskar Kamble (Author), Sankrant Sanu (Editor)
Students of mathematics learn of “Pascal’s Triangle”, “Fibonacci Sequence”, “Rolle’s Theorem” and “Taylor Series.” But they do not learn that these concepts were expounded much earlier than their supposed discoveries in Europe by Indian mathematicians such as Pingala, Hemachandra, Bhaskara and Madhava. Many of the fields of mathematics today— from the decimal representation of numbers and simple arithmetic to algebra, trigonometry, and even calculus—were developed by Hindu mathematicians or owe their origins to their works.

In The Imperishable Seed, Bhaskar Kamble assembles compelling evidence to show how this knowledge was created and transmitted to the rest of the world. He discusses the contributions of ancient and medieval India not only to mathematics, but also to fields such as astronomy and linguistics and how these contributions continue to find applications even today in areas such as computer science.

Finally, he traces why and how the tradition of Hindu mathematics in India came to an end and why most people today do not know about its history.
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India in the Indo-Pacific: Understanding India's security orientation towards Southeast and East Asia (International and Security Studies)
by Aditi Malhotra (Author)
In view of the fast-changing world order, emerging countries are increasingly influencing the dynamics of regional securities. This timely and in-depth book examines India’s reorienting strategic posture and describes how New Delhi’s security policy in the Indo-Pacific region has evolved and expanded over the past two decades. The author argues that India’s quest to leverage its geostrategic location to emerge as an Indo-Pacific actor faces multiple challenges, which create a clear divide between the country’s political rhetoric and action on the ground. The author critically examines these contradictions to better situate India's security role in an increasingly fluid Indo-Pacific region.
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Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II
Madhusree Mukerjee

A dogged enemy of Hitler, resolute ally of the Americans, and inspiring leader through World War II, Winston Churchill is venerated as one of the truly great statesmen of the last century. But while he has been widely extolled for his achievements, parts of Churchill’s record have gone woefully unexamined. As journalist Madhusree Mukerjee reveals, at the same time that Churchill brilliantly opposed the barbarism of the Nazis, he governed India with a fierce resolve to crush its freedom movement and a profound contempt for native lives. A series of Churchill’s decisions between 1940 and 1944 directly and inevitably led to the deaths of some three million Indians. The streets of eastern Indian cities were lined with corpses, yet instead of sending emergency food shipments Churchill used the wheat and ships at his disposal to build stockpiles for feeding postwar Britain and Europe.

Combining meticulous research with a vivid narrative, and riveting accounts of personality and policy clashes within and without the British War Cabinet, Churchill’s Secret War places this oft-overlooked tragedy into the larger context of World War II, India’s fight for freedom, and Churchill’s enduring legacy. Winston Churchill may have found victory in Europe, but, as this groundbreaking historical investigation reveals, his mismanagement—facilitated by dubious advice from scientist and eugenicist Lord Cherwell—devastated India and set the stage for the massive bloodletting that accompanied independence.
Basically Churchill did three things:
Raise troops to fight the Axis powers and paid for them with Indian money
Used Indian resources to fight in the Middle East
Did not mitigate the famine leading to the deaths of three million Indians.
His impact on India was no worse than Hitler on India.
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The Four Chinese Classics: Tao Te Ching, Analects, Chuang Tzu, Mencius
Lao Tzu, Confucius, Mencius, Chuang Tzu


The books collected in this volume represent the first time since the mid-nineteenth century that the four seminal masterworks of ancient Chinese thought have been translated as a unified series by a single translator. Hinton's award-winning experience translating a wide range of ancient Chinese poets makes these books sing in English as never before. But these new versions are not only inviting and immensely readable, they also apply much-needed consistency to key philosophical terms in these texts, lending structural links and philosophical rigor heretofore unavailable in English. Breathing new life into these originary classics, Hinton's new translations will stand as the definitive texts for our era.

Perhaps the most broadly influential spiritual text in human history, Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching is the source of Taoist philosophy, which eventually developed into Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism. Equally influential in the social sphere, Confucious' Analects is the source of social wisdom in China. The Chuang Tzu is the wild and wacky prose complement to the Tao Te Ching. And with its philosophical story-telling, the Menicius adds depth and complexity to Confucius' vision.
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