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Books > Humanities > History > World history > 1750 to 1900
Vladimir Burtsev and the Struggle for a Free Russia examines the
life of the journalist, historian and revolutionary, Vladimir
Burtsev. The book analyses his struggle to help liberate the
Russian people from tsarist oppression in the latter half of the
19th century before going on to discuss his opposition to
Bolshevism following the Russian Revolution of 1917. Robert
Henderson traces Burtsev's political development during this time
and explores his movements in Paris and London at different stages
in an absorbing account of an extraordinary life. At all times
Vladimir Burtsev and the Struggle for Free Russia sets Burtsev's
life in the wider context of Russian and European history of the
period. It uses Burtsev as a means to discuss topics such as
European police collaboration, European prison systems,
international diplomatic relations of the time and Russia's
relationship with Europe specifically. Extensive original archival
research and previously untranslated Russian source material is
also incorporated throughout the text. This is an important study
for all historians of modern Russia and the Russian Revolution.
'There are no two things in the world more different from each
other than East-Indian and West Indian-slavery' (Robert Inglis,
House of Commons Debate, 1833). In Slavery, Abolitionism and Empire
in India, 1772-1843, Andrea Major asks why, at a time when East
India Company expansion in India, British abolitionism and the
missionary movement were all at their height, was the existence of
slavery in India so often ignored, denied or excused? By exploring
Britain's ambivalent relationship with both real and imagined
slaveries in India, and the official, evangelical and popular
discourses which surrounded them, she seeks to uncover the various
political, economic and ideological agendas that allowed East
Indian slavery to be represented as qualitatively different from
its trans-Atlantic counterpart. In doing so, she uncovers tensions
in the relationship between colonial policy and the so-called
'civilising mission', elucidating the intricate interactions
between humanitarian movements, colonial ideologies and imperial
imperatives in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.
The work draws on a range of sources from Britain and India to
provide a trans-national perspective on this little known facet of
the story of slavery and abolition in the British Empire,
uncovering the complex ways in which Indian slavery was
encountered, discussed, utilised, rationalised, and reconciled with
the economic, political and moral imperatives of an empire whose
focus was shifting to the East.
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