Raj; The Making And Unmaking Of British India [Hardcover]

Lawrence James (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 1998

This is the magnificently recounted story of one of the wonders of the modern world. In less than a hundred years the British made themselves masters of India. But the Raj, outwardly so monolithic and magnificent, was always precarious. The twists and turns of' the struggle for independence are told with a wealth of new material.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

When Robert Clive, a "harum-scarum schoolboy" not yet out of his teens, arrived in India in 1744, he found himself in the middle of chaos: English merchants fought against French traders, Indian princes warred among themselves, Portuguese and Dutch privateers plied the coasts, and throughout the country, anarchy reigned. Clive flourished amid the confusion. He quickly distinguished himself both in battle, showing bravery and unusual presence of mind, and in trade. The combination was profitable for his employer, the East India Company, and although Clive committed suicide in the wake of political scandal in 1774, he set in motion what would become the British conquest of India and the establishment of the Raj, a mixed form of government in which the English ruled through a network of Indian politicians and civil servants. Outwardly stable, the Raj was constantly under threat both by Indian aspirations to self-rule and by other imperialists' intrigues, notably on the part of Russia, Britain's chief competitor in what would come to be called "the great game." Lawrence James, a longtime student of British military history, offers a sweeping, and wholly absorbing, narrative account of the Raj, taking it from Clive's time to the era of Mahatma Gandhi and the flamboyant Viscount Mountbatten, the last British viceroy of India. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly

Even though James gives relatively short shrift to the period between the battle of Plassey (1757) and the second Maratha war (1817-1818), when the East India Company used arms and bribery to take over the Indian subcontinent, this is still a big book. But for what the British historian and author of The Rise and Fall of the British Empire wanted to do, it had to be big. James is a very lucid writer on a variety of topics, whether military, economic, social or political. His primary interest has been military history and it shows here. While not every reader will be fascinated by detailed descriptions of, say, military maneuvers of Sikh wars, these same details add intensity to the narrative of the Indian Mutiny (1857-59); the Great Game, that tortuous Anglo-Russian squabble over Afghanistan; or the doings of Subhas Chandra Bose during WWII. Opting against a simple chronology, James works in chapters on the position of Indian princes in the Raj, the differences between British and Indian sexuality and the romanticized, Kipling-esque vision of India that pervaded Britain in the early 20th century. There is a great deal about Britain here: the reception back home of newly rich Nabobs (a corruption of nawab); the British reaction to reports of the Indian Mutiny and the 1919 Amritsar massacre; the irreconcilable friction between Britain's devotion to economic expediency and liberal paternalism. In fact, some may find that the emphasis is a little too much on the "British" of the subtitle and not enough on the "India," but James presents a consistently intriguing take on a deeply complicated history.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 722 pages
• Publisher: St. Martins Press; 1 Us ed edition (December 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 031219322X
• ISBN-13: 978-0312193225
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 2.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (41 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #845,817 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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33 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Vivid Colors, Fuzzy Shapes, January 28, 2001

By 

E. T. Veal (Chicago, Illinois USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Raj; The Making And Unmaking Of British India (Hardcover)

Whatever its impact on India, the two centuries of the British Raj were an inspiration for novelists, poets, painters, film makers and popular historians. Lawrence James falls into the last group. His "Raj" is a set of overlapping portraits: some exciting, some grandiose, some grim, some exotic, all animated and colorful. They do not quite blend into a coherent picture of British rule but are fascinating to view.

Mr. James has set himself the task of covering political, institutional and social history. Although he limits himself to the British point of view, the job is too big for even a bulky volume like this one. As a consequence, many years and events receive brief notices or none at all. (By comparison, Sir Penderel Moon's "The British Conquest and Dominion of India", which concentrates almost completely on politics, is over twice as long.) The institutional and social accounts likewise jump around. There is, for example, a section, set before the Indian Mutiny of 1857, on the onerous taxation imposed on Indian villages, in which we are told of tax rates of 50 to 75 percent of net income. Later, in a different context, appear economic statistics for a single locality, which have the villagers paying taxes of about five percent. The discrepancy is not explained, nor even alluded to. Did the British wisely cut taxes after the Mutiny? Were rates drastically different in different areas? Did widespread evasion make the nominal rates a sham? Are the figures for some reason not comparable? There is no way to tell, and the question is surely not unimportant.

Elsewhere, as in the section on the Princely States, the author recounts a multitude of details without leaving a clear impression. One would like some estimate of the balance between playboy rajas and their hardworking counterparts, and between princes loyal to the paramount power and those who submitted only under duress. The mere alternation of scandal and praise is not satisfactory.

If, however, one looks at the parts without worrying about their sum, this is an informative (and certainly lively) book. Subjects range from concise histories of the Raj's most dramatic eras (its formation in the 18th Century, the Great Mutiny and the nationalist struggles of the 20th century) to taxation and policing to the social and sexual lives of the sahib class to India's participation in the World Wars to literature and films about the Raj. Unhappily, the author's serviceable prose is too frequently marred by copy editing that is wretched even by the low standards of our day. Jarring is the frequent use of "whom" where "who" would be correct (a most unusual error). Surrealistic is this garbled statement (p. 451) about a corps of staunchly Islamic troops: "Pathans, always highly receptive to Pan-Islamic appeals, were responsible for two mutinies of the 130th Baluchis during the winter of 1914-15, both sparked off by fears of being forced to follow Muslims." My puzzlement lasted until I figured out that "to follow Muslims" was supposed to read "to fight fellow Muslims".

Some earlier reviews on this site decry Mr. James' supposed partiality for the British rulers and inattention to the masses of their subjects. That is a misguided criticism. The author is alert for signs of racialism, arrogance and ineptitude among the British, occasionally to the point of unfairness. Were those Englishmen who deplored Hindu customs really more blameworthy than the post-1948 politicians who sought to suppress them and turn India into a secular state (an effort that is now encountering a dangerous backlash)? As for his summary evaluation that the Raj was good for the subcontinent, that is a left-handed compliment. He reckons that, given the realities of 18th and 19th century geopolitics, India was bound to fall prey to some form of European imperialism and that the British form was more benign than any of the alternatives.

It is true that he is strongly critical of Mahatma Gandhi's insouciance concerning the outcome of World War II and of vain, incompetent Lord Mountbatten's handling of the partition between India and Pakistan. Anyone who thinks that India would have been better off in the Far Eastern Co-Prosperity Sphere or that Mountbatten deserves no blame for the butcher's bill of 1948 should turn elsewhere for reading matter, preferably to works of utopian fantasy.

The Raj is such a sprawling subject that no single volume can paint it entire. This one, while imperfect in many ways, is a good starting point.

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An entertaining, uneven history -, May 30, 2000

By 

Luke D Jasenosky - See all my reviews

This review is from: Raj; The Making And Unmaking Of British India (Hardcover)

Professor James' book is enlightening, but also a bit uneven and narrow. The image of jovial British troops in exotic locations will probably always enter one's mind when one thinks of the Raj, but Professor James elaborates nicely on the day to day drudgery of the average soldier, and one of the strongest points of the book is the hot, dusty atmosphere that surrounds his discussions of commerce, the hunt, food, sexual relations, and many other topics. The discussion of India's involvement in the second world war is also fascinating. I do not feel that James' book necessarily presents a biased view, but because it does concentrate on the British experience first and foremost, and relies heavily on British correspondance and debate in parliament, I can understand how one might walk away with the impression that the Indian experience was treated lightly, or even unfairly. On the debit side, I finished the book feeling that I hadn't really learned anything knew about the overarching British imperial experience, and I agree with a previous commentator who stated that the final years were glossed over. The book is also short on maps, and I had to pull out the atlas a number of times to pinpoint the location of the events being described. Overall a good narrative and cultural (on the British side, mostly) history that could have used a larger dose of figures and analysis.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Well-written but limited, August 9, 2003

By 

S. Raja Laskar (Dallas, TX United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India (Paperback)

It is not often that a book with 736 pages leaves one empty. The book should be retitled a military history of the British Raj, as Mr. James uses his considrable talents and efforts on the colonization of India and its staying power, and very very little time and effort on the net result of the modernization of India. The central thesis of the book is that the British were benign autocrats and the Raj was a boon to India. This thesis is debatable but what irks this reader is the limited scope of this book. James spends almost no time on the transforming effects of the Raj on the Indian people, and how the idea of India arose among the people. The reforms of Gandhi were western inspired, and democracy in general a gift from Britain, but James does not discuss how these views arose and evolved among the Indian elite. He barely mentions the Indian presence in the Raj bureacracy and its transforming power, while the "martial races" in the Raj miltary are discussed at length. The rebirth of poetry and literature among the Indian elite is not discussed. And this book is not merely a military history as the British view of colonialism is discussed at length, as seen by the frequent (and nauseating) snippets of Kipling. The battles within Congress, changes in the Indian education, the rise of different ethnic groups within the Raj and the ICS are not discussed. Finally, Muslim fears of a Hindu Raj are mentioned but not adequately explanined. James is at his best when he delves into the adventures of Clive and his compatriots, but the book is not a history of the British Raj, but rather a history of the conquest of India.