Word: indias
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Raffles, a clerk of the East India Company, took ship to the Indies, remarking casually to his aunt that he would come back a duke. "Ah, Duke of Puddle Dock," snorted the old lady (referring to a filthy slum in London's East End). When, 21 years later, the onetime clerk came home to die, he was Sir Thomas Stamford Bingley Raffles, Kt., founder and administrator of the rich island-fortress of Singapore, an imperial hero of the stature of Robert Clive and Warren Hastings, the man who put a stop to East Indian slave dealing and for whom...
...Hahn supports the theory that the British Empire was much more a collection of happy accidents (happy for the British) than the resuit of a long-range policy. But, like all previous biographers, she "has .no doubt about the empire-building ambitions of Raffles himself. "[He] saw the [East India] Company ... a part ... of the great divine plan of empire. He never doubted the final Tightness of empire; he merely doubted the Company's interpretation ... of Divinity's intentions. . . . He dreamed of a great British Empire in the Indies, with Java as the center"-and his French...
...even the East India Company, which harbored more peculiar individualists than any stock-company in history, had ever had to deal with so strange an imperialist as Raffles. While his fellow nabobs made their fortunes in spices and property, or sank into fatty degeneracy under the stewing sun, Raffles immersed himself in tireless study of his surroundings-establishing a tradition of government research that has made Indonesia one of the best documented areas of the British Empire. Botanist, cartographer, linguist, historian, Raffles tramped the jungles of Sumatra, Java, Batavia-areas wrested from the Dutch by Napoleon and, in turn, taken...
...after five years of secretive, studious preparation, Raffles purchased from Johore's Sultan the rights of "protection" over Singapore island. When the news reached London, months later, the East India Company directors were outraged; they had already lost more money than they could afford in such wildcat schemes of trade expansion. But while they debated what to do, the new city of Singapore sprang almost overnight into what Raffles described as "the emporium and pride of the East." Within a year "it was a common sight to count 20 vessels at one time in the harbor"; nine years later...
Madame & the Masters. It was in India-eventually she set up Theosophy's permanent international headquarters at Adyar, Madras-that the pattern of the Society began to crystallize. Here she accumulated Theosophy's assorted bag of borrowings from Buddhism, Hinduism, yoga, the cabala. Here she incorporated the key Theosophist doctrine of reincarnation and developed to the full her hierarchy of "Masters"-Tibetan superbeings who guide mankind through Theosophy...