The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain
Dirks, dean of the faculty and a professor of anthropology and history at Columbia, sets out to dismantle the traditional explanation that Britain's empire in India was, in the famous words of Victorian historian J.R. Seeley, acquired "in a fit of absence of mind." According to Dirks, there was nothing accidental about Britain's "conquest" of the subcontinent in the late 18th century. He argues that public exposure of the East India Company's scandalous corruption by the philosopher and politician Edmund Burke during the Warren Hastings impeachment trial in 1788 persuaded the government to step in and administer what the British regarded as a vulnerable, backward territory. This intrusive, imperialist behavior, claims the author, helped cover up the "corruption, venality, and duplicity" of Britain's presence in India, which was recast as a civilizing mission that also happened to benefit the British economy. In examining the Hastings case, Dirks scores many points, vaporizing comforting visions of a benevolent empire, and he expertly unravels the complexities of Burke—too often caricatured as a reactionary. Unfortunately, portions of the book are rendered too opaque for the general reader by Dirks's political point scoring and his digressions into academic squabbles. 9 b&w photos, 1 map.(Apr.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.