From Mughal Rule to the Raj

Virtual

The shift from Mughal rule to the British Empire in South Asia has long been a subject of interest to scholars and non-scholars alike. Old historical explanations about the decline of the Mughals and the rise of British rule have been challenged recently by new accounts in the overlapping fields of South Asian, British, and global history that have sought to reexamine some fundamental questions: Why and how did the East India Company come to acquire a territorial empire in India?  What was the nature of the change?  Why did Mughal power wane? What effect did this transition have on the social and economic development of the subcontinent?  What relationship was there between the developing British Empire in South Asia and the loss of the British Empire in North America?

All of these important questions have been addressed in the wide-ranging writings of William Dalrymple. His work has won numerous awards and attracted readers all over the world because of his elegant and innovative interpretations. This episode of Chicago Dialogues will bring Dalrymple into conversations with three scholars from the University of Chicago interested in the emergence of British India and the British Empire more generally.

Speaker Profiles

William Dalrymple

William Dalrymple is the bestselling author of the Wolfson Prize-winning White Mughals, The Last Mughal, which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and the Hemingway and Kapucinski Prize-winning Return of a King. His most recent book, The Anarchy, was long-listed for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2019, and shortlisted for the Duke of Wellington Medal for Military History, the Tata Book of the Year (Non-fiction), and the Historical Writers Association Book Award 2020. It was a Finalist for the Cundill Prize for History and won the 2020 Arthur Ross Medal from the US Council on Foreign Relations. 

Dalrymple has been awarded five honorary doctorates, is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Asiatic Society, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and has held visiting fellowships at Princeton, Brown, and Oxford. He writes regularly for the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, and The Guardian. In 2018, he was presented with the prestigious President’s Medal by the British Academy and was named one of the world’s top 50 thinkers for 2020 by Prospect.  He is a founder and co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival.