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  • India Britannica: A Vivid Introduction to the History of British India
  • Rhonda A. Semple
Geoffrey Moorhouse, India Britannica: A Vivid Introduction to the History of British India. (Academy Chicago Publishers, 2000)

Moorhouse’s general, illustrated history of British involvement in India was first published by Harper & Row (New York) in 1983. In 207 pages, the author presents a sweeping narrative account of the British Raj from the arrival of the East India Company to the events surrounding Independence. This alone is a promising introduction, either to a casual student of history looking for a short introduction to the subject, or to any instructor setting a general text for courses on either the British Empire or South Asia. However, Moorhouse fails to live up to the promise of his Prologue. The author does present a “top down” of account of Empire firmly rooted in the metropole. The British protagonists in this story, from the merchants, soldiers and administrators who arrived throughout the eighteenth century to myriad of professionals who joined them from Britain’s expanding middle class throughout the nineteenth century, are described in familiar and friendly terms. These are the “chaps” did their best in the name of the imperial project. What is missing is any real exploration regarding the nature of the encounter on the ground, or from any other perspective than that of the British in India themselves.

The “stuff” of Empire is described in beautifully fluid prose; this can perhaps be read as the early beginnings of what John Mackenzie’s (General Editor) Studies in Imperialism (Manchester University Press). However, while Moorhouse is best at evoking the essence of Empire in the imperial imagination – he is wonderful when describing old familial contacts, adventure stories written for boys and widely-circulated imperial imagery of advertising media – he fails to capitalize on these impressions and delve beneath them to quarry in any depth British imperial connections. At best, the argument is marred by the author’s treatment of any given subject, using evidence of the type of generality unacceptable in an undergraduate paper let alone a published work; at worst, by his inclusion of painful inaccuracies. Two short examples will illustrate this complaint. Moorhouse describes the suppression of thuggee (the supposed ritual murder and robbery of travellers) as one of Governor General William Bentinck’s grand achievements (pp. 73–4). While relating the thuggee story provides a lurid illustration of the danger of the distant unknown, nowhere does Moorhouse question the veracity of the story itself. He similarly fails to provide correct detail about the nature of the administrative investigation into the incidents in question, a process that contributed to the wholesale identification and detainment of “criminal tribes.” The popularity of fictional accounts of the practice, such as P.M. Taylor’s Confessions of a Thug (Edinburgh 1839), is indicative of how India was imagined in nineteenth-century Britain, but Moorhouse offers no discussion about the role such popular accounts played in shaping imperial attitudes. Women are similarly treated less as historical actors and more as decorative pieces in the living space of South Asia. Moorhouse trots out the old arguments about women contributing to the construction of harmful racial attitudes when they join their hardworking male counterparts in the nineteenth century, and save for the remarkable few, relegates them to “fishing fleets” and the maintenance of social hierarchies. There is an unfortunate failure to assess the gendered element of imperial connections in any meaningful way.

This text is further marred by a triumphal British “tone.” What can perhaps best be described in an un-academic manner as “the cringe-factor” worsens as the text progresses to the final chapter, “The Legacy.” Written in his seductively readable style, it gives the impression that the effects of the Raj were only beneficial. On the sub-continent “they [South Asians] tend to remember the good things that the British did and ignore the bad; and it is a fact that today the British are remarkably popular there” (193). Any problems remaining in the sub-continent after independence are deemed indigenous. British beneficence left in place technological infrastructure – which allowed private companies to flourish under the [British] Parliamentary system – and...

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