Time’s Monster

How History Makes History

De: Priya Satia

Narrado por: Tanya Rodriguez, Priya Satia

For generations, British thinkers told the history of an empire whose story was still very much in the making. While they wrote of conquest, imperial rule in India, the Middle East, Africa, and the Caribbean was consolidated. While they described the development of imperial governance, rebellions were brutally crushed. As they reimagined empire during the two world wars, decolonization was compromised. Priya Satia shows how these historians not only interpreted the major political events of their time but also shaped the future that followed.

Satia makes clear that historical imagination played a significant role in the unfolding of empire. History emerged as a mode of ethics in the modern period, endowing historians from John Stuart Mill to Winston Churchill with outsized policymaking power. At key moments in Satia's telling, we find Britons warding off guilty conscience by recourse to particular notions of history, especially those that spotlighted great men helpless before the will of Providence. Braided with this story is an account of alternative visions articulated by anticolonial thinkers such as William Blake, Mahatma Gandhi, and E. P. Thompson. By the mid-20th century, their approaches had reshaped the discipline of history and the ethics that came with it.

©2020 Priya Satia (P)2021 Tantor

Timeless overview of Imperialism

Every citizen on earth should read this book. As an American I learned so much about governmental behavior and the impact of historical meaning making stories on human behaviors.

Outstanding work of scholarship

Another brilliant book that analyses the British conscience during colonization and how that legacy has continued till date and copied by other powers. A must read for someone who is curious to go beyond the obvious narrative and is willing to question the very pillars on which these narratives stand. if nothing, one should be curious as to why the Anglo powers are quick to point to Nazism or Facism or Communism as oppressive,but unwilling to look in the mirror and deconstruct imperialism in the same way!

Very good discussion on colonisation.

One of the finest books this year. You will need to focus when listening - this is not an easy listening book but the topic it covers is hugely important.