Travels through Surinam jungle

 

Excellent condition. PB. 368pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Perched above Brazil on the shoulder of South America, Surinam is a land of myth and magic. Once traded to the Dutch by the English in return for Manhattan, it is now home to the largest tract of pristine rainforest left on earth. 

Andrew Westoll first fell under Surinam's spell as a young biologist, studying monkeys deep inside its primordial jungles. Five years later he returned, determined to chart the human, historical and environmental legacies of this surprising, little-known land. 

What he found was a country poised on the brink of profound change- a nation facing either ecological catastrophe or salvation. 

Westoll explores Surinam's bloody past, the allure of its wild places, the legends and rituals of its extraordinary people. 

An honest and beautiful writer he conjures a place of golden light and impenetrable shadow, of long-held secrets and sacred stories. And in the end he uncovers a nation that- like Westoll himself- is still in search of its own destiny.

SOLD Memoirs of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar

 

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Mint condition. PB. 288pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia.

This 19th-century autobiography offers a rare inside look at the society surrounding a sultan's palace. A real-life princess in exile recalls her vanished world of harems, slave trading, and court intrigues.

Return to an era when Zanzibar was ruled by sultans, and enter a vanished world of harems, slave trading, and court intrigues. In this insider's story, a sultan's daughter who fled her gilded cage offers a compelling look at nineteenth-century Arabic and African royal life. After years of exile in Europe, the former princess wrote this fascinating memoir as a legacy for her children and a warm reminiscence of her island home.

Born Salamah bint Said, Princess of Zanzibar, in 1844, author Emily Ruete grew up in a harem with scores of siblings. The royal family maintained its fabulous wealth and luxury with a robust traffic in ivory, spices, and human bondage. Ruete ventures beyond the palace, into the city and plantations where European traders, missionaries, and colonists exercised a growing influence.

After her dramatic elopement with a German trader, Ruete attained the perspective to form a comparison of the lives of women in Muslim society with those of their European contemporaries. Originally published in 1886, this remarkable autobiography will captivate readers interested in Zanzibar and Eastern Africa as well as students of Arabic, Islam, and women's studies.

About the Author

"Ruete could be the subject of a thrilling romance," enthused Publishers Weekly of this author, who was born in 1840 as Salme, Princess of Oman and Zanzibar. As a 16-year-old, Ruete fled from her cloistered existence to Germany, where she found the freedom to marry her secret lover. Ruete wrote this colorful and informative memoir to introduce her children to their African heritage.

SOLD Encounters between the British Empire and its eastern subjects

 

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Mint condition. PB. 404pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Talented historian Maya Jasonoff offers an alternative history of the British Empire. It is not about conquest -- but rather a collection of startling and fascinating personal accounts of cross-cultural exchange from those who found themselves on the edges of Empire.

A Palladian mansion filled with Western art in the centre of old Calcutta, the Mughal Emperor's letters in an archive in the French Alps, the names of Italian adventurers scratched into the walls of Egyptian temples: in this imaginative book, Maya Jasanoff delves into the stories behind artefacts like these to uncover the lives of collectors in India and Egypt who lived on the frontiers of European empire.

Edge of Empire traces their exploits to tell an intimate history of imperialism. Written and researched on four continents, Edge of Empire tells a story about the making of European empires, ones that break away from the grand narratives of power, exploitation, and resistance, to delve into the personal dimensions of imperialism.

She asks what people brought to imperial frontiers and what they took away, and what motives drove them, whether ambition, opportunism, curiosity or greed. This rich and compelling book enters a world where people lived, loved and died, and identified with each other across cultures much more than our prejudices about 'Empire' might suggest.

About the Author

Maya Jasanoff was born in 1974. She graduated from Harvard before earning her Masters degree at Cambridge University. Her PhD was completed at Yale. She is now Professor of British History at the University of Virginia. She is widely known for her pioneering work on the study of Empire.

In case you still believe people who come to Australia on boats are queue-jumpers ...

 

Mint condition. PB. 332pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia. 

An excellent antidote to the hatred too often directed at "boat people". 

A family's sacrifice - A nation's struggle 

In the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese families set out on perilous journeys in rickety boats to escape communist rule and seek out a better life. Kim Huynh's family was one of them. 

In this unique memoir, Kim traces his parents' precarious lives, from their poor villages in central and southern Vietnam, through relative affluence in Saigon, to their harrowing experiences after the American withdrawal and the fall of Saigon in 1975, which led them to a new life in Australia. 

As Kim explores his parents' stories, he unveils the tragedy and inner strength of ordinary Vietnamese people struggling to survive in a country beset by colonisation and ravaged by war. this gripping story is not only an invaluable piece of political history, but a moving tribute from a son to his parents. 

For fans of Ahn Do's 'the Happiest Refugee' and Pauline Nguyen's 'Secrets of the Red Lantern'.

SOLD Diaries of an Indian official in the British Raj

 

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Mint condition. HB. 656pp. $50 including postage anywhere in Australia.

An engrossing narrative of a colonial subjects life contemplating his Imperial masters at the height of colonialism in India; based upon the first eight years of his life-long diary. 

Amar Singh, a Rajput nobleman and officer in the Indian Army, kept a diary for 44 years from 1898, when he was twenty, until his death in 1942. 

In it he writes about the Jodhpur court, the Imperial Cadet Corps, and the British Expeditionary Force in China during the Boxer rebellion. 

A century before hybridity, he constructs a hybrid self, an Edwardian officer cum gentleman and a martial Rajput cum manor lord. 

With the diary acting as alter ego and best friend, Amar Singh resists becoming a coolie for the raj when he finds the British to be racist masters as well as friends. 

He writes and reads extensively to keep himself amused, he says, and to avoid the boredom of princedom and raj philistinism. 

Here the authors focus on the first eight years of Amar Singhs diary (1898-1905), offering a rare and intimate glimpse into British colonialism from the point of view of a colonial subject. Illustrated with fifty photographs and facsimiles from Amar Singhs readings.

SOLD The wealthy colonialists of Britain

 

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Good condition. PB. 240pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

The late Dr Percival Spear (1901-1982) taught history at St Stephen's College, Delhi, and was the author of The Oxford History of Modern India 1740-1975.

SOLD Children of British India

 

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Mint condition. HB. 362pp. $35 including postage anywhere in Australia.

The children of the raj are legion, yet their story has never previously been told. 

Like Katie Hickman's 'Daughters of Britannia' it is dramatic and traumatic involving dangerous voyages, vivid experiences in exotic places and profound emotions springing from the sudden, unexplained and lengthy separation of children from their parents. 

'We Indian children', the novelist Thackeray called himself when packed off back to England aged 4. 

The tragic plight of such youngers is epitomised by two well-known fictional characters. Punch in Kipling's semi-autobiographical 'Baa Baa, Black Sheep' is bereft of his parents and victimised by his guardian during a five-year exile from India, and Mary Lennox in 'The Secret Garden' is orphaned and transplanted abruptly from a garden full of scarlet hibiscus to a bleak Yorkshire moor. 

Brendon's evocative, at times heart-tugging book, runs from the 18th century and the East India Company, through the Afghan wars, the Indian mutiny and the more settled era of the Queen Empress, and culminates in the conflict leading to Britain's hurried exit in 1947. 

Its subject is the young progeny of traders, soldiers, civil servants, missionaries, planters, engineers and what should be done with them. 

Until the coming of air travel these children often only saw their parents every few years. Then there were the children, often half caste, born of Anglo-Indian marriages and affairs. Sent back to Britain they were often reviled as 'darkies', 'a touch of the tar-brush'. 

And then there were the children educated in India. Brendon reveals appalling stories of abuse at the hands of servants. What frequently unites Brendon's wildly different subjects is their loneliness--drawing on letters, diaries, memoirs and interviews, she portrays children who had to discipline themselves to adapt (often ingeniously) to unfamiliar cultures, far away from family and forced to spend term time in boarding schools and holidays with unfamiliar families.

SOLD The history of the Koh-i-Noor, India's great diamond

 

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Mint condition. PB. 272pp. $18 including postage anywhere in Australia.

In the beginning diamonds came from India, nowhere else. And the greatest of those ancient stones cut a deep and bloody path across the history and legends of the country. 

The Koh-i-Noor, the Mountain of Light, has been fought over, cursed and occasionally lost. Seized by British agents eager to please the young Queen Victoria, it now lies in the Tower of London, its ownership still disputed. Kevin Rushby follows the trail of this great jewel.

France's delusional colonial conquest in the Sahara desert

 

Mint condition. PB. 349pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

The Sahara was the missing link in France's African Empire. The Sword and the Cross is the story of two fanatical adventurers who helped complete their country's imperial conquest. 

Viscomte Charles de Foucauld was a sensualist who lounged in bed eating foie gras with a silver spoon. Henri Laperrine was a stern perfectionist who lived only for soldiering. 

Each of them found his vocation in the desert: Foucauld found religion and an asceticism so great that even Trappism seemed too comfortable; Laperrine formed a legendary camel corps to pursue the Tuareg nomads across the desert. 

By 1910, the Sahara had been won - but as Europe lurched towards war in the years after, both men were to pay a terrible price. 

Weaving together hatred and friendship, self-sacrifice and utter self-delusion, The Sword and the Cross is a brilliant story of a forgotten episode in Europe's colonial history.