"We were exactly the class which filled the Imperial hierarchy...sufficiently well connected to get a place with the East India Company or in the Raj Civil Service, but desperate enough economically to need to send the younger sons out... It was a guy called Stair Dalrymple who ended up in the Black Hole of Calcutta in 1756. And so, generations have been there one after another and like almost all the Brits, probably all the Brits who I'd ever met, it was assumed that colonisation was an act of bringing civilisation to poor benighted natives."
William Dalrymple is a Scottish historian and writer, art historian and curator, as well as a broadcaster and critic. His books have won numerous awards including the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the Kapuściński Award and the Wolfson History Prize. He is also one of the co-founders and co-directors of the annual Jaipur Literary Festival.
