Victor Kiernan - The Lords of Human Kind: European Attitudes to Other Cultures in the Imperial Age

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The Lords of Human Kind

European Attitudes to Other Cultures in the Imperial Age
by Victor Kiernan

Male Daughters, Female Husbands

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CRITICAL PRAISE FOR THE LORDS OF HUMAN KIND

One of the rewards of my career as a historian is to have once suggested the idea of this book to Victor Kiernan, knowing that no other scholar had the brilliance and global range of learning to write it. It is still a marvellous book, fresh as on the day of first publication and ready for a new generation of readers.

Eric Hobsbawm

Victor Kiernans classic work is a marvellous and erudite introduction to the cruelties and absurdities of the European empires and their interaction with the world beyond, the best single volume on the subject there is. With its entertaining style and encyclopaedic range, there is nothing quite like this book. It should be read by every teacher and by every schoolchild.

Richard Gott

[Victor Kiernan is] that great Scottish historian of empire

Edward Said

Absorbing

Shiva Naipaul, The Times

A wry delight brilliant, witty and humane

Philip Toynbee, Observer

The Lords of Human Kind provides an essential anti-Imperialist introduction to global history, and remains an indispensable work for understanding the modern world. The new edition is to be unreservedly welcomed.

John Newsinger, author of The Blood Never Dried: A Peoples History of the British Empire

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Victor Kiernan (19132009) ranks among Britains most distinguished historians. After a fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, and a long period spent teaching in India, he joined the History Department at the University of Edinburgh, where he served as professor of modern history from 1970 until his retirement. Over the course of his life he authored such works as European Empires from Conquest to Collapse, The Duel in European History, Shakespeare: Poet and Citizen, Horace: Poetics and Politics and numerous others, as well as translating two volumes of Urdu poetry.

THE LORDS OF
HUMAN KIND

EUROPEAN
ATTITUDES TO
OTHER CULTURES
IN THE
IMPERIAL AGE

VICTOR
KIERNAN

WITH A FOREWORD BY

JOHN
TRUMPBOUR

TRIBUTE TO VICTOR KIERNAN BY

ERIC HOBSBAWM

The Lords of Human Kind: European Attitudes to Other Cultures in the Imperial Age was first published in 2015 by Zed Books Ltd, 7 Cynthia Street, London N1 9JF, UK

This edition was first published in 2015

www.zedbooks.co.uk

Copyright Heather Kiernan, 2015
Foreword John Trumpbour, 2015

The right of Victor Kiernan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

New material typeset in Monotype Joanna by illuminati, Grosmont
Cover designed by www.alice-marwick.co.uk

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of Zed Books Ltd.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78360-429-6 pb
ISBN 978-1-78360-430-2 pdf
ISBN 978-1-78360-431-9 epub
ISBN 978-1-78360-432-6 mobi

CONTENTS

HEATHER KIERNAN

ERIC HOBSBAWM

JOHN TRUMPBOUR

In memory of Nazir Ahmad, a former Principal of Government College, Lahore, and of excursions to Dovedale, the Khyber Pass, the Oval, the tomb of Hafiz, and other places east and west.

HEATHER KIERNAN

On the morning of 17 February 2009 I received a note from Eric Hobsbawm:

Dear Heather,
What can I say at this moment? Only that I loved and admired him too, and the world is not the same without him. But that is nothing to what you have lost, who renewed his life.
All love
Eric

I was a Jilly-come-lately, having only arrived on the scene in 1984, but it was clear from the beginning that Eric and Victor enjoyed a very deep camaraderie a camaraderie formed during the political, economic and social upheavals of the early 1930s, and one that endured for over seventy years, though they rarely saw one another after Victor settled in Scotland.

I am glad I am always glad to hear from you, if only to confirm that you are still holding your own, Eric wrote in an email when they were both infirmed and near the end of their lives. The important thing is that we should keep up the correspondence one way or another while we can.

Eric Hobsbawm and V.G. Kiernan stood out among the twentieth-century British Marxist historians for their ability to look at history with a global vision. While their contemporaries Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton and E.P. Thompson primarily tackled English topics in their mature historical work, Eric and Victor made ambitious forays across time and continents.

Eric admired Victor for a historical imagination that exposed proto-socialist practices among Jesuits in Paraguay, scrutinized the performance of colonial armies in various lands, and distilled the lessons of Urdu, Greek and English literature. He also believed that Victors persistent criticism of ideologically orthodox arguments inadequately supported by scholarship had an enormous influence on the early debates of the Communist Party Historians Group, citing Victor as our chief doubter.