WINNER OF THE DUFF COOPER MEMORIAL PRIZE | LONGLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE
'Indispensable reading on both India and the Empire' Daily Telegraph
'Brims with life, colour and complexity . . . outstanding' Evening Standard
‘A compulsively readable masterpiece’ Brian Urquhart, The New York Review of Books
A stunning and bloody history of nineteenth-century India and the reign of the Last Mughal.
In May 1857 India’s flourishing capital became the centre of the bloodiest rebellion the British Empire had ever faced. Once a city of cultural brilliance and learning, Delhi was reduced to a battered, empty ruin, and its ruler – Bahadur Shah Zafar II, the last of the Great Mughals – was thrown into exile. The Siege of Delhi was the Raj’s Stalingrad: a fight to the death between two powers, neither of whom could retreat.
The Last Mughal tells the story of the doomed Mughal capital, its tragic destruction, and the individuals caught up in one of the most terrible upheavals in history, as an army mutiny was transformed into the largest anti-colonial uprising to take place anywhere in the world in the entire course of the nineteenth century.
The Last Mughal: The Fall of Delhi, 1857
By William Dalrymple
A stunning and bloody history of nineteenth-century India and the reign of the Last Mughal by the bestselling author of White Mughals
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Book Details
Imprint: Bloomsbury Paperbacks (UK) | Pub date: September 2009 | Format: 198 x 129mm | Extent: 608 pages (Originally published in 2006 in Hardback)
About the Author
William Dalrymple is one of Britain’s great historians and the bestselling author of the Wolfson Prize-winning White Mughals, The Last Mughal, which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and the Hemingway and Kapuscinski Prize-winning Return of a King. A frequent broadcaster, he has written and presented three television series, one of which won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA. He has also won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the Foreign Correspondent of the Year at the FPA Media Awards, and been awarded five honorary doctorates. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and has held visiting fellowships at Princeton, Brown and All Souls, University of Oxford. He writes regularly for the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker and the Guardian. In 2018 he was presented with the prestigious President’s Medal by the British Academy for his outstanding literary achievement and for co-founding the Jaipur Literature Festival. He is the co-host of chart-topping podcast Empire with Anita Anand. William lives with his wife and three children on a goat farm outside Delhi.
