Raj

Lawrence James traces British power in India from the East India Company’s military and fiscal ascendancy in the eighteenth century to the transfer of power in 1947. Robert Clive’s victories in Bengal, the administrative settlements of Warren Hastings and Charles Cornwallis, and Richard Wellesley’s expansionist wars show how a trading corporation became a territorial state. The narrative also follows Indian rulers and confederacies that resisted or negotiated with the Company, including Tipu Sultan and Ranjit Singh, before annexation and reform under Dalhousie helped create the tensions that erupted in the rebellion of 1857.

After the Crown replaced Company rule, the book examines the institutions and contradictions of the Raj: viceroys and princely states, railways and law, military recruitment, racial hierarchy, famine and economic extraction. Imperial confidence under Victoria and Disraeli gives way to organised nationalism, mass politics and the competing demands that accompanied Gandhi’s campaigns and the Second World War. The final chapters consider Churchill’s opposition to rapid withdrawal and the hurried settlement that produced independent India and Pakistan amid partition, displacement and communal violence.