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.

This book celebrates the work and career of the internationally renowned art historian, David Bindman, on the occasion of his 75th birthday, and is above all a tribute to him from his former students and colleagues. With essays on sculpture, drawings, watercolours and prints, the volume reflects the extraordinary range of Bindman's knowledge of works of art and his impact through his teaching and research on the understanding of British and European artistic developments from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. The essays cast light on questions of technique and stylistic change, patronage, collecting and iconography, and engage with issues such as the representation of race, gender, sexuality, political violence and propaganda, exile, and notions of the canon. The artists discussed here include Hogarth, Blake, Roubiliac, Thorvaldsen and Canova, all subjects of books by David Bindman, as well as Morland, Rowlandson, Gillray, Millais, Munch, Nevinson, and Heartfield.

Not so long ago, in certain cities on the shores of the eastern Mediterranean, Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived and flourished side by side. What can the histories of these cities tell us? Levant is a book of cities. It describes three former centers of great wealth, pleasure, and freedom—Smyrna, Alexandria, and Beirut—cities of the Levant region along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. In these key ports at the crossroads of East and West, against all expectations, cosmopolitanism and nationalism flourished simultaneously. People freely switched identities and languages, released from the prisons of religion and nationality. Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived and worshipped as neighbors.Distinguished historian Philip Mansel is the first to recount the colorful, contradictory histories of Smyrna, Alexandria, and Beirut in the modern age. He begins in the early days of the French alliance with the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century and continues through the cities' mid-twentieth-century fates: Smyrna burned; Alexandria Egyptianized; Beirut lacerated by civil war.Mansel looks back to discern what these remarkable Levantine cities were like, how they differed from other cities, why they shone forth as cultural beacons. He also embarks on a quest: to discover whether, as often claimed, these cities were truly cosmopolitan, possessing the elixir of coexistence between Muslims, Christians, and Jews for which the world yearns. Or, below the glittering surface, were they volcanoes waiting to erupt, as the catastrophes of the twentieth century suggest? In the pages of the past, Mansel finds important messages for the fractured world of today.

For those interested in the history of art collecting, this book is a unique source of information. There is a growing awareness not only of the importance of collecting as a factor in the history of art, but also how vital the details of provenance are on items traded in the art market. The author has gone to the most revealing sources to produce, in effect, a history of collecting in England and a study of the gradual emergence of the museum as a national institution. The book also contains a most useful and detailed bibliography of collecting history.