A Concise History of Modern India by Barbara D. Metcalf and Thomas R. Metcalf, has become a classic in the field since it was first published in 2001. As a fresh interpretation of Indian history from the Mughals to the present, it has informed students across the world. In the third edition of the book, a final chapter charts the dramatic developments of the last twenty years, from 1990 through the Congress electoral victory of 2009, to the rise of the Indian high-tech industry in a country still troubled by poverty and political unrest. The narrative focuses on the fundamentally political theme of the imaginative and institutional structures that have successively sustained and transformed India, first under British colonial rule and then, after 1947, as an independent country. Woven into the larger political narrative is an account of India's social and economic development and its rich cultural life.

Barbara D. Metcalf is Professor of History Emerita at the University of California, Davis. Her publications include Islamic Revival in British India (1982) and Islamic Contestations: Essays on Muslims in India and Pakistan (2004).

1. Sultans, Mughals, and pre-colonial Indian society; 2. Mughal twilight: the emergence of regional states and the East India Company; 3. The East India Company Raj, 1772-1850; 4. Revolt, the modern state, and colonized subjects, 1848-85; 5. Civil society, colonial constraints, 1885-1919; 6. The crisis of the colonial order, 1919-39; 7. The 1940s: triumph and tragedy; 8. Congress Raj: democracy and development, 1950-89; 9. Democratic India at the turn of the Millennium: prosperity, poverty, power.