Lexington Books
Pages: 140
•
Trim: 6½ x 9
978-1-4985-9852-1 • Hardback • December 2019 • $104.00 • (£80.00)
978-1-4985-9853-8 • eBook • December 2019 • $98.50 • (£76.00)
Edwin Hirschmann is professor emeritus at Towson University.
Chapter 1: Conscripting a Poet
Chapter 2: Instructing and Dispatching a Viceroy
Chapter 3: The Rise of Racism
Chapter 4: Reaching India and Taking Charge
Chapter 5: The Imperial Assemblage: Lytton's Crescendo
Chapter 6: Famine
Chapter 7: "The Most Dangerous Man in India"
Chapter 8: Internal Problems
Chapter 9: Careers, Protests, and Clashes
Chapter 10: The Vernacular Press and Its Adversaries
Chapter 11: Russophobia
Chapter 12: The Rift with Salisbury
Chapter 13: The Second Anglo-Afghan War
Chapter 14: Resignation and Resentment
Chapter 15: Pursued from India
Chapter 16: Afterwards
This book is a fascinating account of the life of an extraordinary viceroy—a colorful Tory politician sent out by Disraeli to rule India. Drawn from original source materials, The Accidental Viceroy provides an authoritative account of the working of the Raj at its height.
— Thomas R. Metcalf, University of California, Berkeley
A great read. Edwin Hirschmann combines first-rate research scholarship with engaging prose. A biography of the British Viceroy for India, Robert Bulwer-Lytton (1876-1880), this fascinating account covers a period of critical change for both empire and colony. Viceroy Lytton’s life provides the ideal lens for examining the leading developments—the plotting against rival Russia, the determined efforts to snuff out incipient Indian nationalism, providing a clear-eyed account of Britain at its colonial best and worst, its imperialism inexorably intertwined with the racism and misogyny of the Victorian age. The product of a lifetime of study and reflection, Accidental Viceroy will be of great value to anyone interested in comparative imperialism and the tools and ideologies of domination. This volume will also make a fine choice as a focus reading for courses in modern world history.
— Ronn Pineo, Towson University
Few Viceroys of India merit a biography as much as Lord Robert Bulmer-Lytton, whose brief tenure coincided with so many momentous developments in British India. Hirschman’s fine study shows how such a fascinating figure as Lytton—flamboyant, flippant, disputatious, prone to depression, and frustrated by a position he neither expected nor for which he had much appetite, aptitude, or experience—responded to the strategic, economic, political, and cultural challenges which increasingly strained British rule in India. Lytton’s susceptibility to racially-charged and culturally-deterministic readings of India and its people, which underpinned his aristocratically-inclined romanticism, pitted him against advocates for change, whether they were in India or in Britain.
— Douglas Peers, University of Waterloo