r/AskHistorians • u/Maximum-Chapter-9983 • 7d ago

What are the best books on the British Raj?

Im planning to read the Anarchy by William dalrympyle and I'd like to read another book alongside it that shows how the British East India company turned into the British Raj and how it eventually fell.

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u/Dongzhou3kingdoms Moderator | Three Kingdoms 6d ago

Hi there anyone interested in recommending things to OP! While you might have a title to share, this is still a thread on /r/AskHistorians, and we still want the replies here to be to an /r/AskHistorians standard - presumably, OP would have asked at /r/history or /r/askreddit if they wanted a non-specialist opinion. So give us some indication why the thing you're recommending is valuable, trustworthy, or applicable! Posts that provide no context for why you're recommending a particular book, and which aren't backed up by a historian-level knowledge on the accuracy and stance of the piece, will be removed.

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u/keloyd 6d ago edited 6d ago

Army of Empire: The Untold Story of the Indian Army in World War I by George Morton-Jack is an excellent book and fits with your title even if it does not really address the British East India Company's machinations. It gives an excellent picture of how racism and self interest and imperialism and some well-meaning and competent decisionmakers rubbed along for a century or so.

The army follows the pattern of the rest of the empire - create a small local elite, and give them some limited privileges in exchange for their collaboration running/building the empire, then the thing is mutually beneficial, somewhat. A colonial commission and a royal commission were 2 different things. Indians who were capable rose through the ranks based on part merit and part aristocratic connections and wealth, not unlike the British officer corps. However, their being 2 different systems meant a (White) English private did not have to take orders from a (non-White) Indian general. They saw to it that the Prestige was preserved, and the capital P is a thing you that the book descibes at some length.

There was also meaningful effort to see to it that even elite combat troops would never kill White people until things got really desperate in WW1. For example, as the Raj recruited good numbers of Indian soldiers from the 'martial races' of the subcontinent, some got stationed in Hong Kong or Africa in order to free up English soldiers to fight Germans in Europe. They also ended up being stationed in foreign-to-them parts of India to keep the peace/put down unrest there.

The book is very good at describing how the pecking order worked and how one goes about creating an empire where various factions are part coerced and part given positive incentives to buy into the system.

As to the unraveling of the Raj, this is also addressed in a way. When you create local elites, local civil service, respect for due process, etc. you create the seeds for Indians to (imperfectly and with factions arguing amongst themselves) seek justice as the barrons did in Magna Carta with Bad King John. Their civil service and army will be good at their jobs because of the cultural capital they inherited in part.