History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘History’
On the Feast of St John the Baptist, June 24th, 1497, Venetian navigator John Cabot claimed North America for the King of England.
In 1492, Christopher Columbus reached the Caribbean islands, and was hailed as the first European to see the Americas. But this was not North America, the region where the great English-speaking nations of Canada and the United States would later rise. That was discovered — or rediscovered, since the Vikings had been there long before — five years later in 1497.
Britain’s fear of Russia led her to attempt regime change in Afghanistan, but it cost many lives and damaged the army’s reputation.
Jawaharlal Nehru has been telling his daughter about the rise of the Punjab State under Ranjit Singh, who died in 1839. From there he passes on to the stirring events unfolding to the north-west. The British East India Company, then ruling most of India, had been struck by a sudden fear that Nicholas I’s Russia might invade Afghanistan and threaten their Indian monopoly.
The Indian Mutiny began with a revolt among disgruntled soldiers, and ended with the making of the British Raj.
By 1857, the East India Company, a British government agency, had been running India for a hundred years. The Company’s ruthless acquisition of territory, and its high-handed treatment of respected figures and institutions, alienated Indians of all classes; and that May, soldiers in the Company’s militia rose up against their officers. Jawaharlal Nehru explains what happened next.
Incompetence, arrogance and some mischievous propaganda all conspired to throw India into chaos.
In 1757, the British East India Company took control of most of India on behalf of the British Government. The Company employed a large number of Indian-born soldiers in their private army, including Muslims and Sikhs, and in 1857 some of these ‘sepoys’ rose up in rebellion. The reasons were complex, but clearly explained here by two Indian schoolmasters, writing in 1944.
Timur, Muslim lord of Samarkand, threw his weight behind the Golden Horde’s subjugation of Christian Russia, with unexpected results.
Timur, who succeeded his father as Lord of Samarkand in 1369, traced his ancestry back to Genghis Khan, founder of the Mongol Empire in 1206. By the time of his death in 1405, he had humbled kings and kingdoms from Russia to Iran, India and Egypt, and changed the course of history more than once — though not always as he intended.
As Rome’s grip on Gaul tightened, one man still dared to defy them.
In 55 BC, the Roman general Julius Caesar paid a brief and not altogether satisfying visit to Britain, and on his return to Gaul found everything in uproar there too. Slowly he restored order, but in 52 he was confronted with an especially stubborn rebel whom he named simply Vercingetorix, ‘the Commander’. That September, however, Caesar had the Gauls pinned down in Alesia, now Alise-Sainte-Reine.