India Conquered: Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire, by Jon Wilson

Abstract

In recent times, Britain’s imperial past has been mobilised in acts of political expediency, from stressing the role of Scots in building the British Empire during the polemics preceding the 2014 Scottish Referendum, to arguments about the economic opportunities for Britain of closer connection with the Commonwealth during the Brexit campaign in 2016. In turn, this rhetoric has revivified and gilded the image of British imperialism in the popular mind, at worst manifesting itself as uncritical nostalgia for empire and the myths of imperial progress and prosperity. This book for scholars and the general reader by Jon Wilson serves as an antidote, emphasising the follies and failures of empire-builders who produced chaos across the Indian subcontinent, and to whose effective propaganda one can succumb in uncritically celebrating the British Empire. The political concerns of the author run deep, as parallels between historical and contemporary debates make apparent. Just as empire nostalgia has peaked at a particular moment of crisis and conflict in the British polity, so British imperialists projected their power most forcefully in moments of fragility and fear, as Wilson shows. Whereas Liberal MPs are noted as sympathetic to the plight of the colonised or sceptical of British imperialism, Tory grandees are characterised as bombastic imperialists—an exception being Stanley Baldwin, who, as Conservative prime minister, recognised India’s tremendous contributions to keeping Britain’s imperial project from collapse.