A Memoir of Central India
Including Malwa, and Adjoining Provinces

Published in London in 1823, Malcolm's history of Malwa in central India remained the authoritative text for over a century.

John Malcolm (Author)

9781108292054, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 2 June 2011

560 pages, 1 map
21.6 x 14 x 3.2 cm, 0.7 kg

Sir John Malcolm (1769–1833) was a soldier and diplomat in British India and Persia. He returned to India on the eve of the British conquest of Malwa, a region of central India previously little known to Europeans, in 1818. Malcolm studied the region's geology, its agriculture and the history of its ruling families in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His reports were first published in Calcutta in 1821, and were revised and expanded for publication in two volumes in London in 1823. Based on interviews with native inhabitants and oral testimonies, Malcolm's work was the leading authority on Malwa until the 1930s, and remains valuable for its first-hand account of nineteenth-century Malwa's politics, culture and society. The most important chapter of Volume 2 contains Malcolm's recommendations for the future of British rule in Malwa. The volume also has an extensive appendix of over 200 pages of primary texts.

13. Administration of revenue
14. Population of Central India
15. Contrasted view of the state of Central India in 1817 and 1821
16. Reflections on the condition of the British power in Central India
Appendix.

Subject Areas: Asian history [HBJF]