London: Hurst, 2021. v, 432 pp. US$34.95, cloth. ISBN 978-1-78738-385-2.
Promising to be a “new history of British India,” the subtitle of this book is misleading on both counts. It is less a history of British India than a history of the British in India, and far from being new, it harkens back to a historiographical tradition that went out of fashion ages ago. You won’t encounter more than a few Indians in this narrative’s densely-packed pages (nor, for that matter, any British soldiers, planters, merchants, or other auxiliaries of empire). The only men who matter to this story—and they are all men—are those who rose to the upper echelons of the East India Company and its successor, the Raj, the so-called “heaven-born” who ruled British India.
The story Roderick Matthews tells is pretty much the conventional one I was taught 50 years ago. His personality-centred narrative starts with Robert Clive and the other “buccaneers” who turned the East India Company into a territorial state, and looted India in the process. The book then details the expansion and consolidation of British rule (featuring Lord Cornwallis, Richard Wellesley, John Malcolm, Thomas Munro, and Mountstuart Elphinstone); the subsequent campaign to reform and reshape Indian society by Utilitarian and Evangelical-inspired liberals (such as William Bentinck, William Sleeman, and Thomas Macaulay); the conquest of Sind (enter Charles Napier) and Punjab (enter Hugh Gough) and the annexation of princely states like Awadh (enter Lord Dalhousie); the retreat after the trauma of 1857 into a conservative alliance with Indian landed elites (crafted by Lord Canning and Sir Charles Wood) and the increasing embrace of racism and authoritarianism (Lords Lytton and Curzon loom large here); the consequent rise of the Indian nationalist movement (though the Englishman Allan Hume, a founder of the Indian National Congress, garners far more attention than early Indian nationalists like Gopal Gokhale and Bal Tilak); the destabilizing effects of global war and the increasingly desperate efforts by the British to contain Gandhi (the first—and last—Indian in the book to take centre stage); and, finally, the messy denouement of British rule, marked by sectarian conflict, partition, and independence (with profiles of Winston Churchill, Lord Mountbatten, General Wavell, and even the long-forgotten Sir Harcourt Butler, but none of Jawaharlal Nehru or Muhammed Jinnah, the founders of modern India and Pakistan). Given this British-centred narrative, it is particularly head-spinning to find Matthews chiding others for doing what he himself has done: “Indians have frequently been reduced to the role of passive victims in the story, which is both dismissive and inaccurate” (43).
Matthews’ main argument, it seems, is that Britain did well by India, bringing it many of the benefits of modernity until 1857 forced it into reaction and retreat, betraying the Indians who bought into its promises. In making this case, Matthews exhibits an impressive command of the policies and personalities of British India’s rulers, and he tells his tale with some panache. Bon mots stud his pen-portraits. His assessment of the 1857 martyr John Lawrence, for example, is that “nothing in his life became him so well as the leaving of it” (215). While clever, the diction is decidedly old-fashioned. There is a hint here of the larger problem with Matthews’ approach. His single-minded focus on figures who were once celebrated as heroes of empire, but whose luster has now faded, looks a lot like an exercise in nostalgia.
Matthews tries to head off this complaint with a lengthy opening chapter titled “Reshaping the Story,” which reveals his views about British rule in India and announces his objections to other historians’ work on the subject. His views are plentiful, but they are presented as a scattershot series of mini-essays, leaving this reader struggling to find an interpretive throughline. The chapter’s subheadings hint at the thematic and chronological disjunctions. Matthews begins with a discussion of “Whigs and Empire,” then turns to “the East India Company,” “Imperial Realities,” “the Colonial Account,” “Writing the Record,” “Imperialism,” “Divide and Rule,” “Elites and Masses,” “Modernity: Britain and India,” and 10 other topics over the next 40 pages. This chapter comes to a close not with a conclusion that draws together these various threads, but instead with another topic, “1857 Reconsidered.”
The introductory chapter also objects to what other historians have had to say about British India, insisting they’ve gotten it all wrong. Since he rarely identifies these historians and almost never cites their works, it’s hard to know who or what Matthews is referring to. This anonymity reinforces the impression that his bête noires are mostly strawmen and the opinions he attributes to them are largely caricatures. His indiscriminate, all-encompassing hostility to the vast and varied body of work that has been produced about British India over the past 40 years is revealed in this troubling statement: “from the 1980s, academics moved back into Indian history and re-intellectualized the subject, pulling it out of the popular sphere and into a jungle of abstraction and post-colonial jargon” (19). Decades of scholarship are thus summarily dismissed because they are the work of academics, whose professional skills and intellectual abilities are advanced as the reason their histories lack merit. Rather than engage with recent scholarship, Matthews simply resurrects an older, simpler view of British India and labels it new.
Dane Kennedy
George Washington University, Washington DC