Preface

Summary

This entirely original work, unpublished until today, was drawn mainly from the private papers of the first Earl of Minto in the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh and were unavailable to the general reader until 1958. Additional references were taken from official records in the Raffles and Elphinstone Collections in the Commonwealth Relations Office Library (now British Library, India Office Records), London; the Foreign Office records and the Admiralty Papers in the Public Record Office, London; and John Malcolm's papers in the British Museums. The subtitle of this book is taken directly from the title of the doctoral thesis ‘Lord Minto's Administration in India (1807–1813) with Special Reference to his Foreign Policy’, written by Ms Amita Majumdar under the supervision of then Reader in Indian History at Oxford University, Cuthbert Collin Davies and submitted toward fulfilling the requirements for a DPhil degree earned in October 1962.

The author passed away in January 2014 and in tribute to her memory and to get this important work out in the public domain, I presented a proposal outline to Boydell and Brewer. Following extensive discussions with Peter Sowden and input from Professor Huw Bowen at Swansea University, it was decided to extend and update the work for publication using a framework of defence of the British Empire against the threat of Napoleon as the basis for Minto's foreign policy. This would accomplish two primary objectives: i) emphasising a strategic and economic scope of the establishment and jockeying for power of British and French colonial influence in a global context; and ii) updating the work to include current scholarship and new perspectives and opinions which enhance and serve to interpret the thoughts and actions of Lord Minto and the East India Company. Contemporary publications of tracts, periodicals, biographies, published memoirs and correspondence have been valuable sources of information. Full lists of the primary and secondary sources used in this book are listed in the Bibliography and as footnotes where applicable in each chapter.