255 pages, circa 300 illustrations and maps, cloth, dust jacket, very good. 8-1/2 by 11 inches. 1st American edition. From the preface: My first encounter with the lost world of the Edwardians in the tropics was in the billiard-room of the house where I now live in Ireland… Starting like Uncle Bingo as a fireside traveler, I have dipped a little further into the vast pool of memoirs, diaries and letters left by the Edwardians who went out, in one capacity or another, to brave the tropical sun when England's belief in her mission 'to rule the earth' was at its zenith. In my narrow cross-section of empire, I have tried to recreate what it felt like for them, avoiding as far as possible the far more complex and thorny question of the effect of the British Empire on those they 'ruled.' I have also tried to show, without making too much of it, some of the many tensions inside the Edwardian Empire among Englishmen themselves: administrators against traders, settlers against administrators, soldiers against civilians - and almost everyone, it seems, against the missionaries.

OUT THE NOONDAY SUN EDWARDIANS THE TROPICS BRITISH INDIA