The End of Empire in India Revisited

This is the first in a series of three lectures being given on 'The Making and Breaking of States'.

Recent events in the Arab world have sharpened and widened public interest in the way states can be broken and made - often very publicly and dramatically given the role of the modern media. Since the end of the Second World War the world has seen three great waves of state-breaking and state-making: the end of European empires; the collapse of the Soviet Union; and the contemporary 'Arab spring'. By revisiting perhaps the greatest 'imperial ending', the end of British imperial rule in India in 1947, we can investigate issues which may prove helpful in probing the dynamics of other phases of turbulence in the structures and nature of states

Speaker:

Professor Judith M Brown

About the Speaker
The Revd Professor Judith Brown was born in India (1944) and educated in England. Between school and Cambridge she taught in a girls’ boarding school in India. As an academic specialising in South Asia and wider aspects of imperial history, she taught as a Fellow of Girton College, in Manchester University, and then in Oxford as Beit Professor of Commonwealth History and Professorial Fellow of Balliol College (1990-2011). She is a member of the Academia Europea. Most of her writing has been on modern Indian politics (with biographical studies of Gandhi and of Nehru) the South Asian diaspora, and more generally on the British empire. She trained for ordination (2009) at Cuddesdon and helps in a west Oxford parish and in Balliol chapel. She has served on governing bodies of several universities, on the Charles Wallace India Trust, and on the Scholars’ council of the Library of Congress.

This lecture was repeated at the University of Leeds on Wednesday 5 December 2012.