LitArk » Books » Politics

Nico Slate - Lord Cornwallis Is Dead: The Struggle for Democracy in the United States and India

Here you can read online Nico Slate - Lord Cornwallis Is Dead: The Struggle for Democracy in the United States and India full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2019, publisher: Harvard University Press, genre: Politics. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Book:
Lord Cornwallis Is Dead: The Struggle for Democracy in the United States and India
Author:
Nico Slate
Publisher:
Harvard University Press
Genre:
Books / Politics
Year:
2019
Rating:
4 / 5
Favourites:
Add to favourites
Your mark:
- 80
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5

Description
Author's other books
Similar books

Lord Cornwallis Is Dead: The Struggle for Democracy in the United States and India: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Lord Cornwallis Is Dead: The Struggle for Democracy in the United States and India" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

Do democratic states bring about greater social and economic equality among their citizens? Modern India embraced universal suffrage from the moment it was free of British imperial rule in 1947a historical rarity in the Westand yet Indian citizens are far from realizing equality today. The United States, the first British colony to gain independence, continues to struggle with intolerance and the consequences of growing inequality in the twenty-first century.
From Boston Brahmins to Mohandas Gandhi, from Hollywood to Bollywood, Nico Slate traces the continuous transmission of democratic ideas between two former colonies of the British Empire. Gandhian nonviolence lay at the heart of the American civil rights movement. Key Indian freedom fighters sharpened their political thought while studying and working in the United States. And the Indian American community fought its own battle for civil rights.
Spanning three centuries and two continents, Lord Cornwallis Is Dead offers a new look at the struggle for freedom that linked two nations. While the United States remains the worlds most powerful democracy, Indiathe worlds most populous democracyis growing in wealth and influence. Together, the United States and India will play a predominant role in shaping the future of democracy.

Nico Slate: author's other books

Who wrote Lord Cornwallis Is Dead: The Struggle for Democracy in the United States and India? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Lord Cornwallis Is Dead: The Struggle for Democracy in the United States and India — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Lord Cornwallis Is Dead: The Struggle for Democracy in the United States and India" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

LORD CORNWALLIS IS DEAD

The Struggle for Democracy in the United States and India

NICO SLATE

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

2019

Jacket design: Graciela Galup

Jacket art: Bhagat Singh Thing. Courtesy of David Thind and the South Asian American Digital Archive.

978-0-674-98344-1 (alk. paper)

978-0-674-98915-3 (EPUB)

978-0-674-98916-0 (MOBI)

978-0-674-98917-7 (PDF)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Slate, Nico, author.

Title: Lord Cornwallis is dead : the struggle for democracy in the

United States and India / Nico Slate.

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2019.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018007627

Subjects: LCSH: DemocracyUnited States. | DemocracyIndia. |

IndiaCivilizationAmerican influences. |

United StatesCivilizationIndian influences.

Classification: LCC JC423 .G638 2019 | DDC 320.954dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018007627

In memory of Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and Pauli Murray

We have frequently printed the word Democracy, yet I cannot too often repeat that it is a word the real gift of which still sleeps, quite unawakened, notwithstanding the resonance and the many angry tempests out of which its syllables have come, from pen or tongue. It is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted.

WALT WHITMAN

CONTENTS

OUTSIDE THE CITY of Ghazipur, an hour east of Varanasi, the tomb of Lord Charles Cornwallis overlooks the Ganges. A marble dome, seventy-five feet high and sixty feet in diameter, the Cornwallis mausoleum embodies the ambitions of the British Raj. While the Ganges swells and shrinks, the stone crypt holds firm. Cornwallis would be proud. As governor-general of British India from 1786 to 1793, Cornwallis oversaw the growth of one of historys greatest empires. In 1757, the Battle of Plassey had given the British a foothold on the subcontinent. Cornwallis transformed that foothold into an empire that was built to last. His most famous innovation, a new revenue system, was known as the permanent settlement. Cornwallis knew, however, that what seems permanent today may crumble tomorrow. He had, after all, come to India in defeat.

Five years before he arrived in India, Cornwallis lost one of the most momentous battles of the modern era. On October 19, 1781, over six thousand miles west of Ghazipur, a joint force of French and American troops, led by the rebel George Washington, defeated Cornwallis and his soldiers in the bustling port of Yorktown, Virginia. Cornwallis lost much more that day than Yorktown. By surrendering his troops, he guaranteed victory for the rebels. Thirteen British colonies would become the United States of America, and Cornwallis would be shipped home in disgrace. As if his defeat was not sufficiently humiliating, Cornwallis was captured by a French ship while on his way home.

The emergence of the United States, a nation dedicated to democracy, threatened the very idea of empire. The battle of Yorktown did not, however, mark the end of empire or even of the British Empire. The defeat of Cornwallis is better understood as a transition point between empires. Defeated in the New World, the British turned to conquer the Indian subcontinent. As one British Empire died, another was born. Lord Cornwallis embodied the death and resurrection of the British Empire. His journey from Yorktown to Ghazipur reveals that American freedom was, from its inception, bound up with Indian freedomor what might be called Indias enslavement.

The rise of the British Raj was not a simple tale of freedom overcome by tyranny. In India, the British did not encounter egalitarian democracies. They displaced older empires. Cornwallis extended British rule by defeating the great Tipu Sultan. Tipu declared he would rather live a day like a lion than a hundred years like a jackal, and he died on the ramparts of his city. His courage inspired later freedom fighters. But Tipu was no democrat. Like the Mughal emperors that ruled much of India, Tipu Sultan occupied the apex of a divided and unequal society.

As in India so in America, British imperialism was not the only impediment to freedom. What did American independence mean to the hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans living in the rebellious colonies? The Revolution did nothing to break their shackles. At the inception of American independence, it was the British who offered freedom to the enslaved. At the battle of Yorktown, many slaves fled across British lines. Some were turned away by Cornwallis. Others were re-enslaved in the British Caribbean. But many found their freedom with the help of the redcoats.

The story of India and America is a story of many freedoms and many slaveries. In 1920, the African American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois declared, Most men today cannot conceive of a freedom that does not involve somebodys slavery. Du Bois imagined an expansive freedom and then strove to achieve it on a global scale. He was not alone. Thousands of patriots in India and the Unites States struggled to make real the democracy of their dreams. They fought for a freedom that would stretch not only across the borders that divide India from America but also across the borders that divide Indians from Indians, and Americans from Americans.

Today, India and the United States are often celebrated as the worlds two largest democracies. They are also among the most diverse. One of the central arguments of this book is that diversity can enrich democracy by connecting local, national, and transnational social movements. The fragments of the nation can inspire freedom struggles that defy the borders of the nation. Yet neither Indians nor Americans have fully achieved their democratic ideals, and their diversity remains fraught with intolerance and inequality. Other large, diverse democracies bear equally bold aspirations and equally tragic flaws. Think of Brazil or South Africa. But the story of democracy in India and the United States is uniquely significant. While the United States remains the worlds most powerful democracy, Indiathe worlds most populous democracyis growing in wealth and influence. Together, the United States and India will play a predominant role in shaping the future of democracy.

This book traces the many bridgespolitical, economic, cultural, and intellectualthat have linked India and the United States. But this is not a simple tale of the triumph of connection over difference. Indeed, many of the connections at the heart of this book were misconnections defined by mistakes, misunderstanding, or self-centered efforts to appropriate the foreign for intellectual or material profit.

The relationship between India and America began with a mistake. Believing he had reached that fabled land of spices, Christopher Columbus named his new discovery India. Since 1492, India and America have been intertwined. Trade networks carried ice from Walden Pond to Calcutta and an elephant from Calcutta to New York. Transcendentalists corresponded with Indian thinkers. American missionaries flocked to India. Hindu gurus attracted crowds across America. Two hundred thousand American soldiers served in India during the Second World War. While Gandhian civil disobedience inspired the American civil rights movement, the Indian American community fought its own battle for civil rights. Often estranged during the Cold War, India and the United States became allies in its aftermath. From yoga to nuclear politics, and Hollywood to Bollywood, Indo-American relations have become increasingly important to both countriesand increasingly misunderstood.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Lord Cornwallis Is Dead: The Struggle for Democracy in the United States and India»

Look at similar books to Lord Cornwallis Is Dead: The Struggle for Democracy in the United States and India. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Emma Jolly

Tracing Your British Indian Ancestors: A Guide for Family Historians

James L. Huston

The American and British Debate Over Equality, 1776–1920

Madhav Khosla

Indias Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy

Marc Stears

Demanding Democracy: American Radicals in Search of a New Politics

Mahatma Gandhi

Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule

University of South Alabama

Nation to nation: treaties between the United States & American Indian Nations

Kloppenberg

Toward democracy: the struggle for self-rule in European and American thought

Josep Fradera

The Imperial Nation: Citizens and Subjects in the British, French, Spanish, and American Empires

Gandhi

The Indian Ideology

Shashi Tharoor

Nehru : The Invention of India

Gilbert

Black patriots and loyalists : fighting for emancipation in the war for independence

Marsha Ziff

The Reconstruction of the South After the Civil War in United States History

Reviews about «Lord Cornwallis Is Dead: The Struggle for Democracy in the United States and India»

Discussion, reviews of the book Lord Cornwallis Is Dead: The Struggle for Democracy in the United States and India and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.