The East India Company at Home, 1757–1857 explores how empire in Asia shaped British country houses, their interiors and the lives of their residents. It includes chapters from researchers based in a wide range of settings such as archives and libraries, museums, heritage organisations, the community of family historians and universities. It moves beyond conventional academic narratives and makes an important contribution to ongoing debates around how empire impacted Britain. The volume focuses on the propertied families of the East India Company at the height of Company rule. From the Battle of Plassey in 1757 to the outbreak of the Indian Uprising in 1857, objects, people and wealth flowed to Britain from Asia. As men in Company service increasingly shifted their activities from trade to military expansion and political administration, a new population of civil servants, army officers, surveyors and surgeons journeyed to India to make their fortunes. These Company men and their families acquired wealth, tastes and identities in India, which travelled home with them to Britain. Their stories, the biographies of their Indian possessions and the narratives of the stately homes in Britain that came to house them, frame our explorations of imperial culture and its British legacies.

Suman Seth reveals how histories of medicine, empire, race and slavery intertwined in the eighteenth-century British Empire.

Sanford Gifford (American, 1823-1880), a leading Hudson River School landscape painter and a founder of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, was so esteemed by the New York art world that, at his untimely death, the Museum mounted a show of his work-the first monographic exhibition accorded any artist-and published a Memorial Catalogue that, for nearly a century, remained the principal source on his oeuvre. Gifford's art, which was inspired by the work of Thomas Cole, the founder of the Hudson River School, and by that of British artist J.M.W. Turner, and enriched by his travels in Europe (from 1855 to 1857, and from 1868 to 1869), came to be called "air painting," for he made the ambient light of each scene-color saturated and atmospherically potent-the key to its expression. His approach to painting and his unique style gave rise to a highly distinctive body of work with enchanting and mesmerizing effect. This publication examines seventy paintings by the artist and includes comparative illustrations of related works by Gifford, his Hudson River School mentors and colleagues, and those painters, in addition to Cole and Turner, who exerted influence on his art, including Frederic Edwin Church and John F. Kensett. The essays discuss Gifford's place in the Hudson River School, his numerous Catskill Mountain subjects, his experiences and perceptions as a traveler both at home and abroad, and the variety of his patrons. -- Metropolitan Museum of Art website.