WILLIAM DALRYMPLE
M a y a J a s a n o f f ’ s Dawn Watch, a profound mediation on globalisation and colonialism, takes us from Russian-occupied Poland, around South East Asia and up the Congo in Conrad’s footsteps. Jasanoff writes beautifully and the book is well worth reading alone for her evocative and beautifully crafted descriptions of 19th century Singapore, Marseilles and London, as well as her mastery of 19th century seadog slang: where else can you enter a world of dogwatches, pollywogs and shellbacks? But it is far more than that, as she shows how Conrad was among the first writers to grapple with the great issues of our time: terrorism, immigration, the ramifications of rapid technological change and globalisation, and “the way power operates across continents and races.” “Conrad’s world,” she writes, “shimmers beneath the surface of our own.”
I learned a great deal from Jon Wilson’s India Conquered, an admirably concise, balanced and thoughtful look at the degree to which British colonialism maimed India, and the sheer exploitative wickedness of so much of what we did there. The product of many years of detailed archival research, Wilson’s book is without question the best one volume history of the Raj currently in print, and a book I will be recommending to all who assume British colonialism was somehow more altruistic, gentle and benign than its French, German or Belgian counterparts.
I also hugely enjoyed John Keay’s The Tartan Turban. Keay has been writing about Hima- layan history for almost half a century, but his latest, about the allegedly half Aztec half Scottish mercenary Alexander Gardener, is one of the most remarkable of his many books on south and central Asia. Gardener was, in Keay’s words “a be-turbaned colonel of uncertain nationality with a chequered past and a hole in the throat”. This throat wound was a dramatic souvenir of his days as the last of the Western freelances and renegades who had fought for the Indian princes in the period before the Raj seized South Asia, and the age of regulated colonialism replaced the anarchy of the disintegrating Mughal Empire. Many mysteries remain—Keay admits he is still uncertain where Gardner was born or how he really made his way to Central Asia—but The Tartan Turban nonetheless brings back from the dead and largely vindicates the reputation of one of the most extraordinary figures in the history of travel and exploration. Minutely researched, wittily written and beautifully produced, it stands as one of John Keay’s most memorable achievements. William Dalrymple is the author of ‘The Last Mughal’ and ‘Return of a King’ among other acclaimed works of history