William Dalrymple

How a humiliating defeat secured Britain its empire

8 April 2023 9:00 am

After the Amboyna massacre of 1623, the newly-fledged East India Company conceded the spice trade to the Dutch – to focus instead on the riches of India

The forgotten masterpieces of Indian art

21 December 2019 9:00 am

As late as the end of the 18th century, only a handful of Europeans had ever seen the legendary Mughal…

As English spread over the subcontinent, India lost forever its rich Persianate literary heritage

7 December 2019 9:00 am

In the seventh century, the Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang made an epic journey through the Gobi desert and over the…

Algeria reminds us that the current of colonisation doesn’t always run just one way

7 September 2019 9:00 am

As you glide in to land at the airport outside Algiers, the landscape resembles that of Tuscany: a coastal plain…

A drawing of the massacre by Eduard Thöny for the satirical German magazine Simplicissimus, January 1920

Bloodbath at Baisakhi: the centenary of the Amritsar massacre

6 April 2019 9:00 am

On 10 April 1919, the peppery governor of the Punjab, Sir Michael O’Dwyer, ordered the immediate arrest of two leaders…

A Sikh member of the Indian Army Services Corps at Dunkirk, 1940

Britain didn’t fight the second world war — the British empire did

25 July 2015 9:00 am

Had it not been for the empire, Britain might have lost the second world war, says William Dalrymple. The war certainly lost Britain the empire

Lieutenant William Alexander Kerr earns the Victoria Cross in the Great Uprising of 1857

British India — the scene of repeated war crimes throughout the 19th century

14 March 2015 9:00 am

William Dalrymple is uncomfortably reminded of the astonishing savagery by which the East India Company maintained the Raj throughout the 19th century

William Dalrymple's notebook: How I lured Jhumpa Lahiri and Jonathan Franzen to Jaipur

1 February 2014 9:00 am

In 2004, ten days after I moved my family to a new life in India, I gave a reading at…