books on british colonialism

March 15, 2005 11:27 AM

i am interested in recommendations for novels about british colonial period (india, africa, etc). what are your favorites?
posted by dstrouse91 to Media & Arts (27 answers total)

The Flashman novels by George Macdonald Fraser.
posted by malpractice at 11:37 AM on March 15, 2005

Red Earth and Pouring Rain, by Vikram Chandra.
posted by Prospero at 11:38 AM on March 15, 2005

Flashman, Flashman, Flashman.
posted by coelecanth at 11:42 AM on March 15, 2005

greene's heart of the matter; unsworth's sacred hunger.
also, post-colonial, rushdie's midnight's children and non-fiction, said's culture and imperialism.
posted by andrew cooke at 11:44 AM on March 15, 2005

E. M. Forster, A Passage to India
J. G. Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur (more India)
C. S. Godshalk, Kalimantaan
Henry Handel Richardson, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (Australia)
Rodney Hall, The Yandilli Trilogy (yet more Australia)

(And a second for the Flashman series.)
posted by thomas j wise at 11:46 AM on March 15, 2005

I liked the James Clavell "asian saga" books; they begin (chronologically) in feudal Japan and carry on through the British colonial period in China and Japan before moving on to more modern (1970's Iran) locations.

And Kipling, if you're into British India. Gives you a great feel for how the British viewed the Indian people, but it isn't all written from a British perspective. Kipling seemed to identify fairly well with the "native" mentality in some of the stories, and although I'm sure he got quite a lot wrong it's still a better look at India in that time period than I've seen elsewhere. (Not that I've done exhaustive research, but hey.)

Both writers are entertaining, to boot.
posted by caution live frogs at 11:46 AM on March 15, 2005

I have heard tell of The Raj Quartet but have not read it myself.
posted by matildaben at 11:49 AM on March 15, 2005

Cornwell has a Sharpe prequel trilogy of sorts as he comes up through the ranks fighting England's colonial wars: Sharpe's Tiger, Sharpe's Triumph, and Sharpe's Fortress.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 12:11 PM on March 15, 2005

George Orwell's first novel, Burmese Days, is about his experiences as a policeman in the British Imperial police force in Burma (now Myanmar).

It's nonfiction, but his essay "Shooting an Elephant" is an excellent metaphor of British imperialism.
posted by kirkaracha at 12:14 PM on March 15, 2005 [1 favorite]

British North America--The Old American by Ernest Hebert. Terrific insights into Indian society by a historical novelist who does his homework.
posted by LarryC at 12:30 PM on March 15, 2005

The Raj Quartet, mentioned above, is a fantastic and lengthy saga. It's also an excellent (BBC?) miniseries.

The Far Pavillions is another good one. It deals with an English boy who grew up thinking he was Indian, and has the obligatory princess-love story angle. It's a good read.
posted by handful of rain at 12:40 PM on March 15, 2005

Waiting for the Mahatma by R. K. Narayan.
posted by mds35 at 12:40 PM on March 15, 2005

Anthony Burgess's "Malayan Trilogy," The Long Day Wanes, is quite good.
posted by Dr. Wu at 12:48 PM on March 15, 2005

I'll second Forster's A Passage to India, which is a truly Great Book. Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children is ostensibly about the transition from British colonialism to Indian self-rule, though it's also about much more than that. Difficult at times, but a good read. And though it's a completely different ball of wax, Flashman is good, too.
posted by jdroth at 1:12 PM on March 15, 2005

Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda. God what a great book; it intertwines gambling obsession with feminism, labor causes, the nature of glass, and a heavy dose of religion, all under the umbrella of colonialism.
posted by scazza at 1:15 PM on March 15, 2005

White Mughals - William Dalrymple.
posted by DelusionsofGrandeur at 1:16 PM on March 15, 2005

Third Paul Scott's The Raj Quartet. There's a slew of novels about British India - see 'Shadow of the Moon' , by M.M. Kaye for a story about the period around the Mutiny.

The British in Africa - try Weep Not, Child by Ngugi wa Thiong'o for a description of growing up during the Mau Mau 'insurgency' in Kenya in the 1950's.

Karen Blixen's Out of Africa. It's not fiction, but it is an easy read. Or watch the movie.
Elspeth Huxley's Flame Trees of Thika.
posted by darsh at 1:18 PM on March 15, 2005

Oh! Also Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. Not a novel but absolutely facinating. Social writer Mike Davis examines the "coincidence" between the series of famines that swept accross Egypt to China at the end of the 19th century and the advent of British Colonialism. Ecology, commerce and politics, all explained wonderfully by Davis.
posted by scazza at 1:24 PM on March 15, 2005

Kim, Rudyard Kipling.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 1:27 PM on March 15, 2005

DelusionsOfGrandeur is right about White Mughals. So good, I immediately interloaned everything Dalrymple has written. Also very different from the usual view of Company India one usually gets.

Also a third on the Flashman books, although they may not be to everyone's taste (he's a right cad, and proud of it).
posted by QIbHom at 1:42 PM on March 15, 2005

Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart is more about the effects of the introduction of Christianity on the Ebo culture (in Nigeria), than about colonialism as such. But the two are so tied together, really, that it's relevant to your question.
posted by darsh at 1:45 PM on March 15, 2005

I second, third, whatever A Passage to India, The Far Pavilions (it's not just a chick novel) and Out of Africa. As mentioned, Out of Africa is non-fiction but reads as easy as fiction. Dinesen/Blixen was Danish but the story takes place in British colonial Africa (Kenya).
posted by deborah at 1:55 PM on March 15, 2005

I fourth The Raj Quartet, which is truly wonderful. For more India, try Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Heat and Dust and Bharati Mukherjee's Holder of the World. (Mukherjee's novel involves the English, although the protagonists are Americans. But it's also an interesting response to Jhabvala.)

William Golding's Rites of Passage trilogy (Rites of Passage, Close Quarters, Fire Down Below) may not be what you want--it's set entirely on the voyage to Australia, instead of in Australia itself--but it's still quite fine.
posted by thomas j wise at 2:16 PM on March 15, 2005

Late - sorry! Staying On by Paul Scott is set just after the end of the Empire in India. Hope that it still counts in spite of this - it deals with a British army colonel and his wife who decide to stay on in India after independence, and so deals with colonial themes and is besides a rather lovely book.

The last days of the empire in my old home are dealt with in The Last Governor and so again your colonial theme is present and correct - if only just. Read this and the only Tory you won't loathe is the eponymous Patten.
posted by calico at 3:19 PM on March 15, 2005

Ah - and another that just edges the period you're after, but this time from the other side: An Insular Possession, by Timothy Mo.
posted by calico at 3:25 PM on March 15, 2005

Online for free: Rider Haggard, King Soloman's Mines. Great white-man's-burden adventure pulp to counterbalance the artsy stuff already mentioned.
posted by jfuller at 5:20 PM on March 15, 2005

Another vote for Passage to India.

Also interesting is Jamyang Norbu's The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes. A Tibetan writer with a lifelong Holmes obsession, Norbu fills in Holmes' "lost years" (after Holmes apparently died fighting Prof. Moriarity, he disappeared for several years. Part of this time, he tells Watson later, was spent in Tibet).

The book has great descriptions of colonial India, and is intricate play on Kipling's literature of spies and intrigue in the region. It's an act of reverse colonization, in a sense, because it's a Tibetan living in India (and thus someone on the receiving end of two colonizations, the Chinese and the British) who himself appropriates the colonizer's literature to tell his own story. You could write a whole friggin' anthro paper on it before even opening it. But it's also a damn good read.
posted by Polonius at 8:21 PM on March 15, 2005