Abstract
Wilson’s book is an accessible read that could attract a non-specialist audience and offers up a survey of Britain’s relationship with India from the first traders to the last civilians leaving post-partition. That said, this is not a gentle review of a colonial relationship that gives ‘the Raj’ an easy ride. Rather, this is a critical treatment of British engagement with the subcontinent which pulls apart popular myths and assumptions about the nature of British conquest and rule from start to finish.
Wilson’s early chapters depict a Mughal-era subcontinent in which authority was always subject to negotiation, ‘where the acts and beliefs of the powerful could be debated and challenged’ (p. 18). This is in stark contrast with what he goes on to argue in relation to the following centuries. Unlike their Mughal predecessors, Wilson shows us, the response of British imperialists to challenge was to retreat or attack rather than to negotiate (p. 481). The motif running throughout the book is of a cycle of anxiety amongst the British in India resulting in brutal violence, repression and subsequent insecurity. The reassuring ideals of a responsible colonial state, a ‘civilising mission’ or Pax Britannica are roundly dismissed by Wilson’s layering of arguments, building up a picture of the consistent theme in British presence being the undoing of healthy societies and replacement with centralized authoritarianism. As we are told in conclusion, ‘British actions prolonged and fostered chaos far more than they cultivated security and prosperity’ (p. 498). This was sovereignty for its own sake, to reassure a threatened intruder of their own security, never to offer hopes of prosperity or development for those governed.
The book is populated by a cast of case study characters who highlight the tragic contradictions of each stage of British involvement in the subcontinent. We meet the ambitious East India Company-men preserving power at all costs, the Indian lawyers endeavouring reasonable interaction and finding themselves brutally shrugged off, and the very human nationalist figures contending with the legacy of colonialism. Equally, the moments apparently familiar to a popular reader – Plassey, 1857, nationalism, partition – receive a fresh treatment that will surely brush off comfortable imaginings of empire. Wilson brings together the specificities of each stage of the relationship, but all with one over-arching case: that British traders-cum-rulers never sought to enact a grand plan, but simply to protect themselves and their own interests in the most short-term of ways. In the closing chapters he argues for the impact of the Raj legacy in both India and Britain, simultaneously downplaying the impact on a decolonising western power that was embarrassed but prospering, and reflecting on the challenges for a subcontinent still working with the difficulties inherent in re-instating true ‘popular sovereignty’.
India Conquered brings together much-studied incidents and questions in an impressive survey. There is plenty here for the specialist reader and popular interest alike, and either way there is a salutary case about the nature of British imperialism and indeed colonial rule more broadly, for the reader to find.