India.
London: Thornton Butterworth Limited, 1931. First edition, second printing. Hardcover. This first edition, second and final printing, would be quite scarce as it is in the hardcover binding, but thus, spectacularly bright and retaining a portion of the original dust jacket, is quite rare indeed.
India is a collection of ten Churchill speeches as part of his campaign against the India Bill, over which he broke with his party’s leadership. Though his cause was lost, these speeches are considered to contain some of the finest examples of Churchill's rhetorical brilliance. The first edition is most commonly found in orange paper wraps. A much rarer first edition variant was issued in a hardcover (cased) binding of bright orange coarse cloth. A second printing of the first edition was issued in the same month as the first printing. According to Churchill bibliographer Ronald Cohen: "Few cased copies of the second printing are known."
Hardcovers were issued in a striking orange dust jacket that ranks among the rarest dust jackets in the Churchill canon. Jacketed hardcover first printings are coveted, expensive, and scarce; we know of fewer than a dozen surviving examples. Jacketed hardcover copies of the second and final printing were presumed, but entirely unknown until our recent discovery of a single, fully jacketed a few years ago. Now we have this copy as well, this one with a partial jacket.
The volume itself is in improbably bright, near-fine condition. The binding is square, tight, almost immaculately clean, sharp-cornered, and stunningly bright, with the orange hue still equally vivid on both the covers and the spine. The contents reveal why; differential toning to the endpapers corresponding to dust jacket flaps corroborates what the bright binding already testifies – that this copy was long protected by its dust jacket. Only the front flap of that jacket now remains, but even that is a considerable rarity. Notably, the front flap is the portion of the jacket that featured the publisher’s summary of the book. Since this copy retains an important fragment of the original dust jacket, we include a copy of a first edition India dust jacket from our reference collection. We have placed this full dust jacket copy and the original front flap inside a removable, archival quality clear cover. The contents themselves are clean and bright with no previous ownership marks. The chief defect – the only thing that prevents our grading this volume as truly “fine”, is spotting, primarily confined to the text block edges with only minor, occasional intrusions into the text, these mostly confined to the blank inner margins.
India is, in many ways, an archetypal work of Churchill’s “wilderness years” in the 1930s, which saw him out of power and out of favor, unable to leverage the policies to which he nonetheless applied himself with characteristic vigor and eloquence. Churchill spent formative time as a young 19th century cavalry officer fighting on the northwest Indian frontier, about which he would write his first published book. He certainly did not adopt an early progressive attitude toward relinquishing control over the crown jewel of Britain's colonial empire. Nonetheless, it is instructive to remember that many of Churchill's dire warnings about Indian independence proved prophetic. Churchill had warned that too swift a British withdrawal from India would lead to bloody civil war and sectarian strife between Hindus and Muslims, Hindu domination, and destabilizing political balkanization of the subcontinent. All these predictions came to pass and, to a considerable extent, persist today.
On 15 August 1947, under the premiership of Clement Attlee, the Indian Independence Bill took effect, birthing the world’s most populous democracy in what was arguably the largest single act of political liberation in history. Independence also unfettered religious and communal strife that has lethally festered and flared ever since, claiming Gandhi himself in January 1948.
Reference: Cohen A92.1.d, Woods/ICS A38(a), Langworth p.150. Item #008204
Price: $2,500.00