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  • Scandalous Empires, Scandalous Scholarship:Fables of East and West
  • Regina Janes
Nicholas B. Dirks , The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006). Pp. xviii, 389. $27.95.
P. J. Marshall , The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America, c. 1750-1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Pp. vi, 398. $55.

It would be difficult to imagine two books on the same subject that resemble each other less than P. J. Marshall's Making and Unmaking of Empires and Nicholas B. Dirks's Scandal of Empire. Marshall modestly proposes that Britain's acquiring empire in India and losing it in America formed a single complex process of empire building that for local reasons succeeded in one case and failed in the other. Easily stated and persuasive prima facie since, in Britain, the players were the same and the events simultaneous, the argument requires immodest intellectual control over both the imperial center, Britain, and the regions affected, across several historical periods. Few scholars command such diverse materials, but Marshall, like Dryden, makes it seem easy. Distinguishing trade and "expansion" from "conquest," he restores autonomy to local regions from the Carolinas and Caribbean to the Carnatic and Berar, reveals the pivotal role of individuals within larger historical processes (different men, different policies, potentially different outcomes), marks the gradual and uneven development of ideologies of empire and the contribution of little men to empire's success: the Irish Catholics, Indian sepoys, and free Jamaican maroons who, respectively, garrisoned Ireland, held Indian territories, and prevented slave risings in Jamaica. From Marshall's delicate piecing—every fact sports a same-page footnote—powerful narratives emerge.

Applying to America after the Seven Years' War a strategy of sovereignty honed in Ireland and beginning to be applied in India, Britain provoked the loss of its American colonies when it tried to make the conquered ("defended") pay for their own subjection ("defense") and finance future conquests elsewhere. Affirming parliamentary sovereignty, Britain invented American independence as a bogey before Americans seriously considered it, and Americans saw themselves as resisting the "oriental despotism" Britons claimed over Indian territories newly acquired between 1757 and 1764. Indian empire emerges as a variant of Homeric plundering—grab and stay, continuously extracting—with contending theories of sovereignty rapidly developed to justify the grab and to oppose its methods.

Marshall sets right the imperial historiography that blames India's conquest on its "despotism," anarchy, or eighteenth-century "political vacuum" (Dirks 321). Differentiating with admirable clarity the regional conditions that enabled British military adventures to succeed in Bengal, temporize in Madras, and fail in Bombay, he unveils the forgotten debt the British empire owed to the nawabs of Bengal—a rich, stable, well-organized, and administered state able to finance [End Page 314] Britain's conquests elsewhere in India. In Madras, Mughal successor states still contended with independent rulers, providing openings for interested alliances but no base for secure expansion, while Mysore and the Marathas threatened British hegemony until the 1790s and 1810s, controlling British expansion as the Mughal emperor and nawabs of Bengal had once done. In Marshall's India, Indians act: rulers appropriate European innovations and conquered peoples negotiate with their new rulers, some finding advantage in changes that destroyed their compatriots, including the great bank of Jagat Seth.

Ireland's contribution to imperial ideology suffers from the alternating focus on Asia and America, but the text's strengths reveal the weakness and partly redeem it. The Irish participate with the Scots in imperial expansion early in the century and piggyback on the American struggle as victims of empire at the end. Only in the piggybacking protests are the Irish revealed as victims of earlier, more stringent imperial legislation that anticipates the later American debates. As a conquered "sister kingdom," Ireland pivots between Marshall's contending concepts of empire: empire of conquest over alien others (India) and empire as partnership of equals (America). With only a whiff of scandal, Marshall brings the world together and shows how empires have been made and unmade.

Dirks turns Marshall upside down. Ignoring the balance of Britain's empire (Scotland, Wales, Ireland, the Americas, invisible Australia), he brandishes...

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