The Chaos of Empire
The British Raj and the Conquest of India
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The popular image of the British Raj-an era of efficient but officious governors, sycophantic local functionaries, doting amahs, blisteringly hot days and torrid nights-chronicled by Forster and Kipling is a glamorous, nostalgic, but entirely fictitious. In this dramatic revisionist history, Jon Wilson upends the carefully sanitized image of unity, order, and success to reveal an empire rooted far more in violence than in virtue, far more in chaos than in control.
Through the lives of administrators, soldiers, and subjects-both British and Indian-The Chaos of Empire traces Britain's imperial rule from the East India Company's first transactions in the 1600s to Indian Independence in 1947. The Raj was the most public demonstration of a state's ability to project power far from home, and its perceived success was used to justify interventions around the world in the years that followed. But the Raj's institutions-from law courts to railway lines-were designed to protect British power without benefiting the people they ruled. This self-serving and careless governance resulted in an impoverished people and a stifled society, not a glorious Indian empire.
Jon Wilson's new portrait of a much-mythologized era finally and convincingly proves that the story of benign British triumph was a carefully concocted fiction, here thoroughly and totally debunked.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wilson, senior lecturer in history at King's College London, ambitiously challenges the image of the British Raj as stable, unitary, and fully sovereign over the millions of Indians it claimed to govern. Tracing the history of British power in India from the founding of the East India Company and its claim to monopoly power over Asian trade to the cusp of Indian independence in 1947, Wilson paints a picture of an unruly, fragmented empire riven by violence and unrest. British officials shunned open engagement with Indian rulers, preferring to sequester themselves in Europeanized enclaves and churn out reams of paperwork that served to cover up the messy realities of British rule in India. Wilson's major intervention is to resist the temptation to take the Raj at face value. "In reality," he writes, "the British proclaimed their strength and purpose when their authority seemed the most fragile," rendering largely meaningless historians' preoccupation with analyzing the rhetoric of the civilizing mission and other justifications for empire. Puncturing myths about the Raj, Wilson may understate the material and epistemological transformations occasioned by imperial rule by limiting his definition of power to political power, but his bold claim is ably supported by deep research.
