Christopher Bayly is Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge. He was born in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, and attended the Skinners' School there, followed by Balliol and St Antony's College, Oxford. He has been a Fellow of St Catharine's College since 1970 and was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1990.

Bayly's work has been concerned with modern Indian, British imperial and, more recently, world history. He carried out his doctoral work in the city of Allahabad in north India, the home of the Nehru family and other important nationalist leaders.

He then worked on the towns and trading people of north India during the rise of the English East India Company. This research resulted in RULERS, TOWNSMEN AND BAZAARS: NORTH INDIAN SOCIETY IN THE AGE OF BRITISH EXPANSION (1983).

There followed INDIAN SOCIETY AND THE MAKING OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE(1988) in the New Cambridge History of India series, of which he is associate editor.

Bayly widened his scope to write about the British Empire when it first became a world power in IMPERIAL MERIDIAN:THE BRITISH EMPIRE AND THE WORLD 1780-1830 (1980).

He then did further detailed work on India which resulted in EMPIRE AND INFORMATION (1996), a work about intelligence and information gathering in colonial India.

Most recently he has published THE BIRTH OF THE MODERN WORLD - GLOBAL CONNECTIONS AND COMPARISIONS 1780-1914 (Blackwell, 2003)

Co-author: Tim Harper

Following the immense praise for Bayly and Harper's FORGOTTEN ARMIES its authors now tackle with the same verve, controversy and wit the even more contentious issue of how new nations were born from the wreck of Britain's empire in southeast Asia.

The almost continual fighting that followed Japan's defeat scarred everywhere in the region - from the violent British occupation of south Vietnam to the horrors of Partition in India; from the hasty retreat from Burma to the Malayan 'Emergency', one of the first and most dramatic counter-insurgency wars of the twentieth century.

FORGOTTEN WARS explores the lives of politicians, soldiers and ordinary people as the travails of decolonisation merged with the hatreds of the Cold War.