Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920 (review)

The Raj remains one of the chief preoccupations of both British imperial history and postcolonial studies, yet we lack histories both broad and deep that capture the historical reasons for its centrality. Imperial Connections offers an erudite account of how India functioned as a sub-imperial power and how Indians made their way across the variegated landscapes of the British Empire in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By re-centering the history of British India in the larger context of the “ocean arena,” Thomas Metcalf offers one model of how to transnationalize the study of the Raj, illuminating new domains of future research and raising critical questions about the relationship of empire to the regional, the global, and the intra-colonial as well.

Metcalf focuses on the period between the aftermath of the Mutiny and the beginning of the end of British imperial fortunes worldwide in the 1920s. His emphasis is on subjects available mainly in official archives, and his main objects of inquiry are the influence of Indian models and practices on other administrative systems and the movement of people from India into other parts of the Empire. But what a lot of ground he manages to cover. Chapters 1, 3, and 4 examine the Indian legal system, the military, and the police to make the case that in the web of empire, India was more than simply one of its many spokes, constituting instead a nodal point for the transmission of imperial power. So, for example, parts of India’s legal and administrative apparatus were exported to other parts of the Empire, which took to them more or less well depending on their distance from Calcutta and the tenacity of other imperial regimes of law and bureaucracy (like the Ottoman and the French). Just as significantly in a century shot through with “little” imperial wars, Indian soldiers were at the front lines of a host of inter- and intra-imperial conflicts. While the use of Indian regiments to quell the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 is among the best-known of these examples, Metcalf demonstrates how central such troop movement was to the long- and short-term security of the Empire tout court—and how controversial the question of which colonial governor should pay for it was as well. Of great interest in the current moment will be his account of how “the subjugation of Iraq was the work of the Indian army” (xii) in the context of the struggle for Mesopotamia during the Great War. Here Metcalf comes up against the temporal and even structural limits of Indian influence—for due to a host of geopolitical rationales, Iraq was not to be Indian.

Metcalf is less sure-footed on the subject of identity, as in chapter 2 where he uses such disparate examples as “notions of ‘indolence’ to land tenures to architecture” (47) to illustrate the impact of the Raj in the production of colonial forms of knowledge in Malaya. While he is cognizant of and interested in how categories like race and gender enter into his story, he misses opportunities to show us how critical they were to the ideas about and practices of imperial power for which British India and Indians were carriers in this period. Also, despite the freshness of the Indian Ocean world material, the notion of cross-relay (as between India and Malaya) is familiar from scholarly work on India and Ireland or India and the antipodes—work which suggests that the exceptionality of the spatial configuration he insists on may be overemphasized.

Chapters 5 and 6, on the influence the Raj in Natal and East Africa respectively, follow similar lines of argumentation, excavating the deep history of “coolie” migration from India and the schemes for colonization generated by the pull of imperial capital and Indian entrepreneurship along the fin-de-siècle continental coast. Here Metcalf is at his narrative best...