Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750–1850

Talented historian Maya Jasonoff offers an alternative history of the British Empire. It is not about conquest – but rather a collection of startling and fascinating personal accounts of cross-cultural exchange from those who found themselves on the edges of Empire.A Palladian mansion filled with Western art in the centre of old Calcutta, the Mughal Emperor’s letters in an archive in the French Alps, the names of Italian adventurers scratched into the walls of Egyptian temples: in this imaginative book, Maya Jasanoff delves into the stories behind artefacts like these to uncover the lives of collectors in India and Egypt who lived on the frontiers of European empire. ‘Edg…