Merchant's Tale Books in Order

Merchant’s Tale begins in India in 1857, at the moment commonly called the Great Mutiny in older British accounts. Wareham makes clear that the story is filtered through the views of its period, especially the assumptions of British people who believe in the legitimacy of their rule.

Robert Meiklejohn is born into that world. He is the son of an India country merchant, shaped by British confidence and by the practical realities of life far from England. The first book, Birth of the Raj, follows him first as a soldier in the Company’s Army in its final years.

The old order is breaking.

As the Company gives way to the Raj, Robert has to work out where he belongs. In Adrift In The World, he survives the fighting around Delhi with honour, tries England, and finds it alien. Ceylon, Calcutta, trading houses, official delegations, and the new India pull him back toward the world that made him, even when he cannot feel fully at home there.

This is a series about identity as much as empire. Robert is English, but not quite English in the way people in England expect. He knows India, but that does not make him Indian. His usefulness comes from the same in-between position that leaves him unsettled.

Read Birth of the Raj first, then Adrift In The World. Together the two books look at war, trade, administration, marriage, and belonging during one of the great transitions in nineteenth-century British India.