Percival Spear

Thomas George Percival Spear OBE (1901–1982) was a British historian of modern South Asia, in particular of its colonial period. He taught at both Cambridge University and St. Stephen's College, Delhi.

Quotes

• The contact of two races so dissimilar in character, in culture and in institutions as the English and the Indian raises the problem of the contact of cultures in its most acute form. Mutual influence is easiest when two cultures are basically the same; radical difference tends either to mutual repulsion, or to absorption of one by the other. (Spear 1963:126)
  • quoted in Trautmann, Thomas R. (2008). Aryans and British India. p 109
  • The nabobs: A study of the social life of the English in eighteenth- century India. London: Oxford University Press.