A panoramic social history chronicling the lives of hundreds of British people of all classes in the most important territory of the British Empire.
David Gilmour is one of Britain's most admired and accomplished historical writers and biographers. He is the author of lives of George Curzon (Duff Cooper Prize) and Rudyard Kipling (Elizabeth Longford Prize) and of The Ruling Caste- Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj, an acclaimed study of the administrators of Victorian India. His other works include The Last Leopard, a biography of Giuseppe di Lampedusa (Marsh Biography Award) as well as several books on the modern history of Spain and the Middle East. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a former Research Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford.
Brimming with colourful details, his book has no time for academic
jargon or pretentious theorising ... Gilmour is interested in human
complexity, not in moralistic posturing
*Sunday Times*
This is the best kind of history: meticulously researched,
elegantly and entertainingly written, and as wide in its sympathies
as it is long in its reach
*Spectator*
Glorious, human, colourful, teeming and spicy. If you read just one
book on imperial India, let it be this
*Sunday Express*
He knows the material backwards and marshals it with style,
elegance and wit ... The British in India should be the first book
that anybody consults on the East India Company or the Raj
*Oldie*
All British colonial life in India is here present in elegant
prose, 350 years of battles and durbars, maharajahs' balls,
viceregal tiger shoots and Shimla shenanigans telescoped down into
telling anecdotes and witty, skilfully sketched vignettes
*Guardian*
The British in India is an exceptional book ... a penetrating and
vivid portrait of the British men and women who ran the show from
the mid-18th century to 1947
*The Times*
Impressive ... This is a rich and nuanced social history that does
not treat every British footstep on the subcontinent as if it were
a step on the way to the Amritsar massacre. That does not make it
an imperial whitewash.
*New Statesman*
Extraordinary ... It simply has to be read, over and over again
*Herald*
He gives us just about everything one has ever heard of, or would
wish to know, about the British in India, from what these
expatriates ate - anglicised curries and kedgeree, with chicken as
a backstop - to their painful separation from their children, who
were sent "home" to school at the age of five. Superbly researched,
The British in India is authoritative and comprehensive
*Sunday Telegraph*
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