Confessions of a Thug

Description

Confessions of a Thug was the first dramatic account to expose a European readership to the fantastic world of the murderous Thugs, or highway robbers, who strangled their victims and who have ever since been a stable of Western popular culture

• This new edition is based on the original 3-volume first edition from 1839 published by Oxford University Press, which is now extremely rare
• One of the most important novels of British India, and comparable to Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901) and E.M. Forster's A Passage to India (1924)
• Two original sources carefully transcribed as appendices further explore the Thuggee
• Introduction, comprehensive annotation, select bibliography and chronology of the author

About the Author(s)

Philip Meadows Taylor

Kim A. Wagner is Professor of Global and Imperial History at Queen Mary, University of London. He completed a Ph.D. on the subject of 'Thuggee' at the University of Cambridge in 2003, supervised by the late Professor Sir Christopher Bayly. His research is situated at the cusp of Imperial and Global history, focussing on knowledge, crime and resistance in British India, and on colonial violence and warfare in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. His publications include Thuggee: Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-Century India (Palgrave, 2007); Stranglers and Bandits: A Historical Anthology of Thuggee (OUP India, 2009); The Great Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the Making of the Indian Uprising (Peter Lang, 2010); The Skull of Alum Bheg: The Life and Death of a Rebel of 1857 (Hurst/OUP/Penguin, 2017); and Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre (Yale, 2019).

Table of Contents

Introduction
Note on the Text
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of Philip Meadows Taylor
THE CONFESSIONS OF A THUG
Appendix
Glossary
Explanatory Notes