In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920
  • Pegram Harrison
Thomas Metcalf . Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007. xv + 221 pp. ISBN 978-0-520-24946-2, $39.95 (cloth).

Here is an imperial connection: Sir Thomas Theophilus Metcalfe (with an "e"), 4th Baronet, served as agent of the Governor-General of British India at the court of the Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah. This was in the years immediately preceding the period of this book by the nearly eponymous Thomas Metcalf (no "e"), Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley. The similarity of names is a coincidence, but the two Toms share a complexity of interest and range of reference in their representations of mid-nineteenth-century India. In addition to his administrative and political work, Sir Thomas bequeathed the world a fabulous collection of over one hundred paintings by Indian artists, the Delhi Book, now in the British Library—a great treasure of images from a period when the British commercial presence in India intermingled with local cultures in ways that rapidly changed after the rebellion of 1857 and a [End Page 537] substantial hardening of British political control. Similarly, Professor Thomas has used visual sources to explore the relationships and structures of influence that men like Sir Thomas helped to form in the mid-nineteenth century, by examining Indian architecture and Britain's Raj (An Imperial Vision, 2002). Now, the Professor has given the world a different view of imperial India that embraces several emerging trends in historiography and offers innovative perspectives on the economic history of the Indian Ocean region.

Imperial Connections seeks to re-center the British empire. What does this mean? Most imperial historiography, despite multifarious protestations to the contrary, maintains Britain at the heart of an ideological view of empire, a conceptualization in which each colony is assumed to exist only in its relation to the imperial center. A re-centered historiography posits a web of intersecting strands of influence, with no direct routes to a single locus of control, and identifies nodal points from which radiate outward everything that makes an empire work. Metcalf sees India as just such a node, emanating people, ideas, goods, and institutions around the Indian Ocean region in ways that sustained the empire and gave it its character. These ways certainly connected to a central British ideology, but did not flow directly from it. Put simply, Metcalf maintains that the work of empire in the Indian Ocean region was done in large measure by Indians. He substantiates this through examinations of the soldiery doing much of the conquering, the workers exploiting most colonial resources, and the professional and clerical staff maintaining the structures of governance. Without this human capital drawn from India, the empire would not have been able to expand or sustain itself over the period.

Metcalf's oceanic perspective is distinctive. Other scholars have studied regions by looking at how oceans became the medium through which people, goods, and institutions spread. Braudel wrote on the Mediterranean, K. N. Chaudhuri adapted this perspective to the Indian Ocean in the 1970s and 1980s, and a very recent contribution has emerged from Sugata Bose (A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire, 2006) looking at a slightly broader period. Metcalf's work shows oceanic historiography in a new light—not as a period when the Ocean was reduced to the status of a "British lake," but as one when the networks of trade and exchanges of ideas could not have been possible without India's mediating role in the Imperial project. By combining this nodal conceptualization of India with the oceanic perspective, Metcalf contributes more richly than many of his colleagues to these two evolutions in historiography.

Metcalf engages interestingly with current debates on globalization. With the rise of aggressive nationalism in the 1930s, India concentrated on achieving self-sufficiency in ways that cut it off from [End Page 538] the global economy. But, in the period under analysis, 1860–1920, Metcalf shows how it achieved an interconnectedness, and a freedom of trade and movement that...

pdf

Share