Colonel George Bruce Malleson (8 May 1825 – 1 March 1898) was an
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ide ...
officer in
India
India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...
and author.
Biography
Malleson was born in
Wimbledon
Wimbledon most often refers to:
* Wimbledon, London, a district of southwest London
* Wimbledon Championships, the oldest tennis tournament in the world and one of the four Grand Slam championships
Wimbledon may also refer to:
Places London
* ...
. Educated at
Winchester
Winchester is a City status in the United Kingdom, cathedral city in Hampshire, England. The city lies at the heart of the wider City of Winchester, a local government Districts of England, district, at the western end of the South Downs Nation ...
, he obtained a cadetship in the Bengal infantry in 1842, and served through the
second Burmese War
The Second Anglo-Burmese War or the Second Burma War ( my, ဒုတိယ အင်္ဂလိပ် မြန်မာ စစ် ; 5 April 185220 January 1853) was the second of the three wars fought between the Burmese Empire and British Em ...
. His subsequent appointments were in the civil line, the last being that of guardian to the young
maharaja
Mahārāja (; also spelled Maharajah, Maharaj) is a Sanskrit title for a "great ruler", "great king" or " high king".
A few ruled states informally called empires, including ruler raja Sri Gupta, founder of the ancient Indian Gupta Empire, an ...
of
Mysore
Mysore (), officially Mysuru (), is a city in the southern part of the state of Karnataka, India. Mysore city is geographically located between 12° 18′ 26″ north latitude and 76° 38′ 59″ east longitude. It is located at an altitude of ...
. He retired with the rank of colonel in 1877, having been created C.S.I. in the
1872 Birthday Honours.
He was a voluminous writer, his first work to attract attention being the famous "
Red Pamphlet", published at
Calcutta
Kolkata (, or , ; also known as Calcutta , List of renamed places in India#West Bengal, the official name until 2001) is the Capital city, capital of the Indian States and union territories of India, state of West Bengal, on the eastern ba ...
in 1857, when the
Sepoy Mutiny
The Indian Rebellion of 1857 was a major uprising in India in 1857–58 against the rule of the British East India Company, which functioned as a sovereign power on behalf of the British Crown. The rebellion began on 10 May 1857 in the for ...
was at its height. He continued, and considerably rewrote the ''History of the Indian Mutiny 1857-8'' (6 vols., 1878–1880), which was begun but left
unfinished
Unfinished may refer to:
*Unfinished creative work, a work which a creator either chose not to finish or was prevented from finishing.
Music
* Symphony No. 8 (Schubert) "Unfinished"
* ''Unfinished'' (album), 2011 album by American singer Jor ...
by
Sir John Kaye. Among his other books the most valuable are ''History of the French in India'' (2nd ed., 1893) and ''The Decisive Battles of India'' (3rd ed., 1888).
He authored the biographies of the Mughal Emperor
Akbar
Abu'l-Fath Jalal-ud-din Muhammad Akbar (25 October 1542 – 27 October 1605), popularly known as Akbar the Great ( fa, ), and also as Akbar I (), was the third Mughal emperor, who reigned from 1556 to 1605. Akbar succeeded his father, Hum ...
, the French governor-general
Dupleix and the British officer
Robert Clive
Robert Clive, 1st Baron Clive, (29 September 1725 – 22 November 1774), also known as Clive of India, was the first British Governor of the Bengal Presidency. Clive has been widely credited for laying the foundation of the British ...
for the
Rulers of India series
The ''Rulers of India'' was a biographical book series edited by William Wilson Hunter and published from the Clarendon Press, Oxford. Hunter himself contributed the volumes on Dalhousie (1890) and Mayo (1891) to the series.
Background
William ...
.
He died at 27 West Cromwell Road,
London
London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...
, on 1 March 1898.
Works
*
* Full text online at ibiblio.org (All six volumes, including the first two originally by Sir John Kaye, in HTML form, complete, chapter-by-chapter, with all illustrations, footnotes and a combined index)
Volume I 1878.
Volume III 1880.
Volume V 1889.
* Pub. 1883. Full text online at ibiblio.org (In HTML form, complete, chapter-by-chapter, with all illustrations and footnotes)
* Full text online at archive.org. Malleson's own condensed version of the six-volume history.
* Pub. 1896. Full text online at ibiblio.org (In HTML form, complete, chapter-by-chapter, with all illustrations and footnotes)
''History of the French in India''1893 (2nd revised ed.)
''Dupleix and the Struggle for India by the European Nations''1899
*
History of Afghanistan, from the Earliest Period to the Outbreak of the War of 1878'' Pub. 1879. 2nd ed. London: W.H. Allen & Co.
translation of this workwas used for training British military interpreters in the
Pashto language
Pashto (,; , ) is an Eastern Iranian language in the Indo-European language family. It is known in historical Persian literature as Afghani ().
Spoken as a native language mostly by ethnic Pashtuns, it is one of the two official languages ...
.
*
*
*
References
Attribution:
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Further reading
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External links
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Malleson, George Bruce
19th-century English historians
1825 births
1898 deaths
British East India Company Army officers
People from Wimbledon, London
British Army personnel of the Second Anglo-Burmese War
People educated at Winchester College
Companions of the Order of the Star of India
English biographers