LE MAITRE DE LA TOUR (M).
The History of Ayder Ali Khan, Nabob-Bahader: or New Memoirs concerning the East Indies. With Historical Notes.
Life of the Sultan of Mysore
A robust account of the life of Hyder Ali Khan (c.1720-1782) who, as the Sultan of the Kingdom of Mysore, sternly resisted the British East India Company in the first two (of four) Anglo-Mysore wars.
The author, a Frenchman by the name of M. Maistre de la Tour, states that he was driven to write his history to combat the ‘rhapsodies’ produced by ill-informed authors who had never been acquainted with the Sultan. Unlike those writers he claims, in his preface, to have been an ’eyewitness to part of his [Hyder’s] conquests, and of the glory that surrounds him’ (p. x).
First published in Paris in 1783, when the Anglo-French War (1778-83) was still burning, it is unsurprisingly (and arguably fairly) anti-British: ‘If the English should find that they are not spared, it will not be in their power to reproach him [the author] with having invented any untruth’ (p. v).
Possibly unrecorded, with no copies of the second edition in Copac or WorldCat.
