Background
Smith was born in Dublin on 3 June 1848 which was then part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
(Smith's book is a seminal and comprehensive history of In...)
Smith's book is a seminal and comprehensive history of India from antiquity until the Muslim conquest, covering over a millennium that saw Alexander the Great's conquering army arrive as well. From the preface: "This edition presents a view of the early history of India as it appears to me after nearly forty years study. It is as accurate and up-to-date as I can make it, but does not pretend to be final, because finality in a work dealing with a subject so progressive is unattainable. The mass of new matter and fresh discussion accumulated since the publication of the last edition, a little more than five years ago, is so great that difficulty has been experienced in maintaining the decision to confine the book within the limits of a single volume of reasonable size and moderate price. It would be much easier to expand it to double the length. Notwithstanding constant effort to avoid prolixity and wearisome details, material enlargement, compensated in some measure by certain omissions, has proved inevitable. Readers are invited to remember that the book was designed to be, and still is, primarily a political history. It is not intended to be an encyclopaedia of Indian antiquities, as some critics seem to think that it ought to be. The History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon (1911), planned as a companion volume in order to give the history of Indian artistic utterance so far as it can be recovered, renders unnecessary any detailed account of the subject in this work. Special treatises on the history of literature, science, philosophy, religion, and institutions, so far as they exist, must be consulted by students desirous of full information on those subjects., which cannot claim more than slight notice in this work. Although emendations in both form and substance have been made in every chapter, the general arrangement remains unaltered.
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Smith was born in Dublin on 3 June 1848 which was then part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
He passed the Indian Civil Services exam in 1871 and was appointed to what would become the United Provinces in India. He would go to serve between 1871–1900 in a variety of magisterial and executive positions including terms as district and sessions judge eventually retiring as commissioner in July 1900. By 1910 Smith was settled in Oxford where he joined Saint John"s College and was appointed a Curator of the Indian Institute.
He also published two comprehensive volumes on Indian history, The and The Oxford History of India.
Smith was honoured with the award of Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire and awarded a doctorate by Dublin University in 1919.
(Smith's book is a seminal and comprehensive history of In...)
(Lang:- English, Pages 457. Reprinted in 2015 with the hel...)