Dr Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, MBE, studied Urdu and Hindi at the School of Oriental and African Studies. She was awarded a first-class honours degree and completed her PhD there, which was subsequently published as A Fatal Friendship: The Nawabs, the British and the City of Lucknow in 1985. She visits the subcontinent as frequently as possible and was an invited speaker at a recent Jaipur Literature Festival. She has been the archivist at the Royal Society for Asian Affairs for ten years and a Council Member of the Royal Asiatic Society. She was awarded an MBE in 2015 for services to the British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia (BACSA) and British Indian studies.
<p><span style="color: rgb(15, 17, 17); font-family: "Amazon Ember", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">The city of Lucknow was the epicentre of the uprising of 1857. In Lucknow, 1857 ― part of a new series of books on India’s historic battles ― historian Rosie Llewellyn-Jones examines the conflict in detail, from the British annexation of Awadh to the Indian response and the subsequent revolt by sepoys. The defeat of a unit of the East India Company’s army at Chinhat led immediately to the siege of the extensive British Residency in the heart of the city. Here, nearly 3,000 people ― British, Indian and Anglo-Indian ― held out for four and a half months. The winter saw huge defensive barricades being built around Lucknow, but the British recapture was the inevitable outcome, with their superior firepower. This richly illustrated field guide draws on Llewellyn-Jones’s intimate knowledge of the city to paint a vivid picture of the events that unfolded in this historic urban battlefield.</span><br></p>
