The Chaos of Empire: The British Raj and the Conquest of India
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"Jon Wilson visits often ignored arenas of British-Indian contact to mount a devastating critique of British rule. The exercise of sovereignty . . . was deemed sufficient unto itself. Policy-making was chaotic and implementation uneven. . . . The only constant was violence. This is a brave and long-overdue riposte to Raj romanticists." —John Keay, author of India: A History and The Honourable Company
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The longstanding mythology of the British Raj is starkly and critically wrong. In this dramatic revisionist history, Jon Wilson upends the carefully sanitized image of unity, order, and success to reveal an empire rooted far more in violence than in virtue, far more in chaos than in control. Following the lives of administrators, soldiers, and subjects—both British and Indian—this compelling narrative traces Britain's rule, from the East India Company's first transactions in the 1680s to Indian Independence in 1947. The result is a story of continual conflict and lasting legacy: The Raj was the most public demonstration of a state's ability to project power far from home, and its perceived success was used to justify not only British but also American interventions around the world in the years that followed. Trouble was, the story of benign British triumph in India was a carefully concocted fiction, here thoroughly and totally debunked.
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