A Very Ingenious Man: Claude Martin in Early Colonial India

Rosie Liewellyn-Jones is Archives and Records Officer at South Bank University, London. She is the author of A Fatal Friendship: The Nawabs, the British and the City of Lucknow (OUP, 1985) and Engaging Scoundrel: True Tales of Old Lucknow (forthcoming form (OUP).

'Llewellyn-Jones tells a good story as close to a page-turner as one is likely to find in books on Indian history. It is intelligent and sensible, offering marvelous texture and detail '----Association for Asian Studies Journal

'Dr Llewellyn-Jones is an historian, with impeccable scholastic credentials, and has written a meticulously researched and documented historical work '---Chowkidar,UK

About the Book:

Architect, soldier, surveyor, inventor, planter, botanist, financial advisor, political commentator and philanthropist, Claude Martin was one of the most fascinating adventurers associated with the East India Company in eighteenth-century India.(p) Martin designed and built some of the finest houses and buildings in Lucknow; he helped make some of the earliest maps of north-east India; he experimented with hot-air balloons and bladder surgery; he advised the British and the nawabs of Awadh on financial and political matters; he earned notoriety for his sexual liaison; he patronized the arts and his bequests as philanthropist are still alive in the form of several schools named after him, in Lucknow, Calcutta and Lyon.

This reissue, with a new preface, of the first full, thoroughly researched account of the life of this extraordinary individual will captivate general readers and interest historian of the early days of Empire.