History of India under Humayun (Hardbound - 1994)

William Erskine's Baber and Humayun stands as the earliest scholarly account of the Mughal rulers in India by a British author. Erskine combined a meticulous and critical knowledge of the voluminous Persian source material with the philosophical outlook of an 'Enlightenment' historian, emulating Montesquieu and Voltaire in his desire to present individual historical facts as expressive of the constitution and spirit of a whole society.

Erskine's high regard for Baber as a man was tempered by his realisation of Baber's true status among the Indian Mughals, recognizing him to have been at best a successful soldier of fortune and leader of a band of individual adventurers, rather than an 'emperor' faced in his lawful inheritance by contumacious Afghan subjects.

For Erskine, both Baber and Humayun ranked as political prospectors who filed claims to a political stake in India, but whereas Baber stayed to guard and work his claim until he died, Humayun sought temporary relief in opium dreams from the continuous political spadework demanded of him, until, at his death, he had only just succeeded in preventing the removal of his claim from the register of history.

William Erskine (1773-1852) accompanied Sir James Mackintosh, the philosopher and political economist, to Bombay as his secretary in 1803. He rose to become Master in Equity in the Recorder of Bombay's court before being obliged to leave India in 1823 on suspicion of embezzlement. He spent the rest of his life in Scotland, occupying the post of Provost of St. Andrews in 1837-38. Baber and Humayun was published posthumously in 1854.