RAJ: The Making and Unmaking of British India

I purchased the Raj because I knew very little about the British experience on the India sub continent. Thanks to the author's fine narrative I now know a little more than I did before. I was surprised by several of the author's assertions, notably that the Indian mutiny of 1857 was a "civil war "rather than an insurgency. From my limited observation the British response to the Mutiny was very similar to the American response to the Iraqi insurgency in that in both instances liberal disbursements of cash purchased tribal loyalty to the government. Secondly I realize the author is a Brit but I was still amazed that he can conclude that the British conquest of India, despite the wholesale destruction of Indian culture and the deaths of God only knows how many Indians, was beneficial to the Indians. I would highly recommend the "RaJ" toanyone looking for a primer on the British Empire in India with the caveat that this is an anglophile's version of events.

Lawrence James gives his readers exactly what the title indicates--a narrative about the rise and fall of British power in India. This topic is obviously a loaded one in India itself and is still quite contentious in post-imperial Britain.The book is highly informative. James loads facts on his readers. He uses quotes and anecdotes well. He is also even-handed in his treatments. The fact of the matter is: the British took power and maintained power in India for a reason. The United Kingdom was effective in using a "divide and conquer" approach to governance. Simply put, India is a region as diverse as Europe. The various ethnic and linguistic groups had different interests. The British used these differences to their advantage. (Imagine if the Indians took over the Roman empire and used the Spanish to control the English, and had the Greeks monitor the French). Technological superiority in military matters was far less significant than is commonly thought. Given the huge disparity in numbers, there is no way the British could have maintained their control without some form of acquiescence from the peoples of India.When the Raj was wrong, James is more than willing to say so. He notes the incompetence and arrogance of British rule when it is appropriate. A sense of superiority among the British alienated the Indians and work against the long-term interests of the United Kingdom. Challenging the conventional wisdom, James criticizes the actions of Gandhi and Mountbatten in the 1940s. Gandhi never faced the cold hard fact that the Nazis were something far worse than the British and that there were important divisions in India that he could not simply ignore away out of existence. He also blames Mountbatten, in part, for the bloodshed that came with partition.James's conclusion that British imperialism was something good for India, though, is a bit hard to swallow. It is true that the United Kingdom did made positive contributions to public life and it is also just as accurate that rule from another foreign power (Portugal, which arrived before and stayed after the British, or Japan, which threatened to take over in the 1940s), but no one wants foreign rule no matter how benign.

An absolutely great book! Americans do not understand the reasons the Brits stayed so long,other than profits. The English military was used and abused during this over 100 years of eventual fultility and LOTS of wasted lives. The old "stiff upper lip" mentality didn't work.

A few months back an Amazon reader left a comment on one of my previous reviews encouraging me to investigate the works of British historian Lawrence James. I'm glad that he did; I had not heard of James before and would likely not have discovered this wonderful narrative history of the British imperial experience in South Asia otherwise.There is an intriguing puzzle at the center of the "The Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India." How did a relatively tiny island nation thousands of miles away subjugate and then for a century rule a subcontinent populated by hundreds of millions of natives with a proud history of self-government, literature, architecture, and warfare?James suggests that two factors above all enabled this improbable conquest of Britannia in India. First, the native cultures of the subcontinent had long respected and remained loyal to centralized authority (e.g. the caste system), so long as that power was overwhelming and appeared destined to win. Thus, from beginning to end, the Raj rested on a tenuous foundation of prestige and the deliberate, often Ruritarian display of authority. Any threat to the guarded image of British invincibility threatened the entire enterprise. Second, the Raj was able to effectively divide-and-conquer. The upper castes and the rural princes were given a privileged, relatively secure role in the Raj and the ryots (peasants) ostensibly benefited from the peace and stability that British influence brought to India. James stresses that the British could only have succeeded with widespread and determined native collaboration, a fact that still rankles contemporary Indian self-consciousness.In the end, James maintains that the Raj was unmade mainly by the British themselves. On the one hand, the empire failed to emulate the practices of the Romans, who offered conquered peoples the ability to eventually enter Roman public life on a level plane. The author notes continuously how highly talented and generally loyal Indians were stymied by British contumacy. In support of this claim, James chronicles the use of the "n-word" by the British and how it seemed to spread with each successive generation of British overlordship. On the other hand, the nature of the Raj was powerfully influenced by domestic political changes in England in the late 1880s. The British presence and conduct in India had no more vigilant and strident critic than Labor MPs back in London.A major side theme of "The Raj" is the nineteenth century cold war between England and Russia that we know today as "the Great Game." A simple syllogism underpinned the British commitment to India and likewise motivated Russian foreign policy: Britain was strong and affluent because of the Empire; the Empire would be nothing without India; Britain would not be strong and affluent if India was lost. James sees the whole Russo-British contest as a farce. He compares it to the chess strategy known as "maskirovka" - a ploy to hide one's true focus by threatening a perceived weakness (James suggests that British India played the same role in nineteenth century Russian foreign policy as Cuba did in the mid-twentieth). James argues that the true national interest of the Tsars was always Constantinople and the Balkans; the much ballyhooed central Asian invasion route to India was a mere diversionary tactic. Thus, James sees "masterly inactivity" as clearly the right approach to British foreign policy, not the so-called forward school.It is also worth noting that James is positively hostile toward Gandhi. "For all his public humility, Gandhi was at heart a vain man who wanted Indian freedom on his own terms and through his own methods...Gandhi was also a consummate showman and a shrewd politician, with a knack projecting himself in such a way as to attract the greatest possible attention in India and abroad...even [his] now familiar loin clothes was a prop in a well-though-out piece of political stagecraft." It takes a bold man to shred so thoroughly one of the few national leaders to emerge from the twentieth century with their reputation fully intact and growing by the decade.The only person who is attacked more consistently than Gandhi is the last viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten. He is described as vain, overly ambitious, self-absorbed, and the worst thing a British official in India could be, impartial (in this case, to the Hindu cause as represented by Gandhi and Nehru). James places the death of several hundred thousand Hindus and Muslims in Punjab during partition in 1947 - "one of this century's most appalling human catastrophes" - squarely at Mountbatten's feet for his lack of effort in preventing the sectarian violence.In all, I cannot imagine a more informative and easily accessible history of the two hundred year British experience in India than this.