FOR ALL WITH AN INTEREST IN THE HISTORY
OF THE EAST INDIA COMPANY AND THE BRITISH RAJ
ONLINE LECTURES
Online lectures run from November to April. They are broadcast via Zoom and are available UK-wide and to an international audience. Lectures are recorded and uploaded to YouTube for two weeks. Links are emailed to all ticket-holders.
HOW TO BOOK
Tickets £5 per lecture
Tickets may be booked online by selecting ‘BOOK NOW’, by post or by bank transfer.
If booking by post or by by bank transfer, please follow the instructions given here.
How to book
LECTURE PROGRAMME 2024–25
MONDAY 11 NOVEMBER 2024 18.30-20.00 GMT (ZOOM)
Empire Incorporated: The Corporations that built British Colonialism
Philip Stern
This lecture challenges conventional wisdom about where power is held globally. Philip Stern argues that rather than playing a subordinate role, corporations took the lead in global expansion and administration. From Ireland to India, the Americas, Africa and Australia, British colonialism was above all the business of corporations. Corporations conceived, promoted, financed and governed overseas expansion, making claims over territory and peoples while ensuring that British and colonial society were invested, quite literally, in their ventures. Nor did venture capitalism cease with the end of empire. Its legacies raise questions about corporate power that are as relevant today as they were 400 years ago.
Philip J. Stern is Professor of History at Duke University, NC. He is a historian of the British Empire and author of the The Company-State and Empire, Incorporated (2023).
TUESDAY 10 DECEMBER 2024 18.30-20.00 GMT (ZOOM)
John Company's Armies: The Military Forces of British India
Peter Stanley
Composed of men of diverse ethnicities and faiths, under the flag of the East India Company, the armies of British India conquered or controlled much of the Indian sub-continent by 1850. Four armies fought for ‘John Company’: the three presidency armies of Bengal, Madras and Bombay and the regiments of the British Army rented from the Crown by the Company. Together this collection of European and Native corps—regular and irregular—numbered over 300,000 uniformed men at its height.
Peter Stanley traces how they were commanded, how they lived and died, and how they prepared for and fought major wars and faced dozens of insurrections and rebellions. He also examines the distinctive military culture they created, which was decisively changed by the 1857 Mutiny.
Peter Stanley is Research Professor in the Australian Centre for the Study of Armed Conflict and Society, University of New South Wales, and was Principal Historian at the Australian War Memorial from 1987-2007. His works on the Indian Army include John Company’s Armies: The Military Forces of British India 1824-1857 (2024); White Mutiny: British Military Culture in India; and Hul! Hul! The Suppression of the Santal Rebellion in British India, 1855. He is the author of the Mansergh series of novels, featuring Sergeant Major Nelson Mansergh of the Bengal Horse Artillery.
TUESDAY 14 JANUARY 2025 18.30-20.00 GMT (ZOOM)
Ireland and India
Jane Ohlmeyer
This lecture examines four interconnected themes. First, how Ireland, England’s oldest colony, formed an integral part of the English imperial system. Second, how the Irish operated as agents of empire, playing active roles in European expansion, joining colonial settlements, serving as soldiers and clergymen and forging networks as traders. Third, how Ireland served as laboratory both for imperial rule and resistance to imperial rule, with common processes and practices, relating to law, land and anglicisation, characterising the implementation of English imperial authority in both Ireland and India. Finally, Jane Ohlmeyer examines the impact that India had on people living in early modern Ireland and how empire is remembered, represented and misrepresented.
Jane Ohlmeyer is Erasmus Smith’s Professor of Modern History at Trinity College Dublin. She is the author of Making Empire: Ireland, Imperialism, and the Early Modern World (2023), based on her 2021 James Ford Lectures, Oxford University, and editor of The Cambridge History of Ireland, vol. 2.
MONDAY 24 FEBRUARY 2025 18.30-20.00 GMT (ZOOM)
The Rise and Fall of the City of Lucknow
Rosie Llewellyn-Jones
Lucknow enjoyed a short but spectacular rise after the Nawabs of Avadh made it their capital. Celebrated as a city of palaces, shrines and extraordinary European-inspired architecture, the arts of dance, music, drama, poetry, painting and silverware flourished under its immensely wealthy rulers. This cultural splendour ended when the East India Company annexed Avadh and the Indian Mutiny erupted. The city was occupied by rebel sepoys and Lucknow became famed throughout the Empire for the defence of the British Residency by its garrison of soldiers and civilians, its reliefs by Havelock and Outram and its eventual fall to the British, which reduced sectors of the city to rubble.
Rosie Llewellyn-Jones MBE is a renowned historian of colonial India. Her many books include Lucknow 1857 (2022); The Last King in India: Wajid Ali Shah; The Uprising of 1857; A Fatal Friendship: The Nawabs, the British and the City of Lucknow; and, most recently, Empire Building: The Construction of British India, 1690-1860.
TUESDAY 18 MARCH 2025 18.30-20.00 GMT (ZOOM)
Second Arakan 1943-44
Tim Moreman
The hard-fought Second Arakan campaign was a second attempt by Allied arms to advance in the coastal Arakan region in western Burma. It shattered the myth of Japanese invincibility that had crippled the Allied cause and offered the prospect of successful offensive operations. Tim Moreman examines the range of actions that made up Second Arakan, from XV Indian Corps’ push down the Burmese coast towards Akyab Island to the key events of the Japanese Ha-Go operation launched by Twenty-Eighth Army. These include the Battle of the Admin Box near Sinweyza, where the surrounded 7th Indian Division inflicted a serious defeat on the Japanese 55th Division; the reinforcement of Imphal and Kohima; and the seizure of Razabil, the Tunnels and Point 551 between March and May 1944
Tim Moreman is a freelance military historian who was formerly a Lecturer in War Studies at King’s College, London, and briefly Resident Historian at the Staff College at Camberley. His books on the Indian Army include Second Arakan 1943–44: Shattering the Myth of Japanese Invincibility (2025), Japanese Conquest of Burma 1942 and Chindit 1942-45.
TUESDAY 15 APRIL 2025 18.30-20.00 BST (ZOOM)
Fighting Retreat: Churchill and India
Walter Reid
Winston Churchill was closely connected with India from 1896, when he landed in Bombay with his regiment, until independence in 1947. No other British statesman had such a long association with India―or interfered in its politics so consistently and harmfully. Churchill strove to sabotage any moves towards independence, crippling the Government of India Act over five years of dogged opposition in the 1930s. As Prime Minister Churchill frustrated the freedom struggle from behind the scenes, delaying independence by a decade. To this day he is ‘the’ imperialist villain for Indians, held personally responsible for the Bengal Famine. At the Colonial Office Churchill was outstandingly liberal, risking his career with his generosity to the Boers and the Irish, and later speeding up independence in the Middle East. Why was he so strangely hostile towards India?
Walter Reid was educated at the Universities of Oxford and Edinburgh. His books include Fighting Retreat: Churchill and India (2024); Neville Chamberlain: The Passionate Radical; Churchill 1940-1945: Under Friendly Fire; and several works on the First World War.