In late April 1782 a House of Commons committee condemned Thomas Rumbold, member of Parliament and former East India Company governor of Madras, for his corrupt dealings with the Nawab of Arcot and with Indian zamindars as well as the accusation that Rumbold's impolitic dealings with the regional powers had provoked war in the Carnatic in 1781. In the eyes of many Britons, Rumbold embodied the avariciousness and corruption of the East India Company in general and of its nabobs in particular. Moreover, Henry Dundas sought the passage of a Bill of Pains and Penalties against Rumbold and a second requiring of him a £100,000 security for himself. Though many within Parliament, and likely many beyond it too, assumed Rumbold guilty, by the end of the session, and in the face of increasing doubt over the constitutional validity of such proceedings, the bills lapsed. What did not diminish, however, was the growing public concern over the methods and measures East India Company men used to conduct trade, extract revenue, and exercise authority in Bengal, Madras, and other parts of the Indian subcontinent. Popular debate and discussion about Rumbold and the corrupt practices he seemingly embodied succeeded those that had swirled around nabobs like Robert Clive in the 1760s and proved a prologue to the protracted deliberations during the impeachment proceedings against Warren Hastings in the late 1780s and early 1790s.

These debates and the imperial discourse they precipitated, which addressed the issues of corruption, honor, reputation, morality, and authority, are the focus of Joseph Sramek's Gender, Morality, and Race in Company India, 1765–1858. Ambitious in scope, the book concentrates upon “opinion” and the place it occupied in the preservation of British imperial prestige as well as its importance in underpinning the justifications for empire Britons relied upon in the century that preceded the Sepoy crisis of the late 1850s. Built upon concepts of honor and reputation, but also upon an emerging popular and metropolitan or domestic political culture (a theme Sramek might have discussed with greater precision and in greater detail), an “empire of opinion” ideology (5) came to dominate British thinking about company India and to dictate modes of behavior and professional conduct and, ultimately, to constrain cross-cultural interaction between Britons and Indians. For Sramek, this ideology proved essential in the decades before the Great Rebellion of 1857 because it buttressed “an image of British moral and racial superiority [that] was everything as it ensured Indian loyalty and deference” (4). Those familiar with the scholarship of Susan Bayly, Thomas Trautman, and Tony Ballantyne, among others, will question the existence in late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century company India of the scientific, rigid, and routinized racial categories that Sramek suggests motivated the British, at the behest of Governor-General Cornwallis in 1793, to try to rule with very few Indian intermediaries. The exception to this general rule was the reliance on martial peoples—Gurkhas, Sihks, Rajputs, and Muslims—on the subcontinent because the Sepoys came to be seen, and accorded status and a modicum of respect, as gentlemen soldiers (67–95). Paradoxically, the presence and proximity of Sepoys made it even more important that “superior” Britons conduct themselves in accordance with this ideological framework. From the 1780s onward, then, these imperial and imperious expectations circumscribed, as Sramek shows, Anglo-India business connections, financial ties, and social relations, and systematically alienated the rulers from the ruled, the colonizers from the colonized (39–66). From the eighteenth century onward, then, the Indian came to be characterized and caricatured as corrupt, immoral, effeminate, and venal. Such stereotypes came to dominate British discourse and thinking, and ensured the exclusion of Indians from company administration and authority from the governorship of Charles Cornwallis in the 1780s until that of William Bentinck in the late 1820s. On the themes of isolation and then the partial “Indianization” of company offices, and the debates they fostered, Sramek provides original and compelling evidence (92–126) to sustain his argument.

Furthermore, and reflective of an impressive and growing literature on company India, Sramek reminds his readers of the importance of gender in the construction and maintenance of morality and colonial rule. Perhaps less innovative on the interstices of these themes than Sramek suggests, since the work of Durba Ghosh, Clare Midgley, Kathleen Wilson, Catherine Hall, Phillipa Levine, Mrinalini Sinha, and Antoinette Burton to mention but a few who immediately come to mind, his findings confirm the importance of class-bound perceptions of manliness and masculinity, and middle-class preoccupations with morality and manners within the British imperial world in general and particularly within company India and later within the Raj. The British desire to maintain order, hierarchy, and authority, and to reflect moral and racial superiority in company India, may have manifested an imperious confidence, but ironically that aura masked a deep-seated colonial anxiety that Sramek suggests should be seen, not as a product of the Raj, but of the preceding century of company rule that precipitated the Sepoy Rebellion and ultimately the expulsion of the East India Company from India itself.

Finally, and animating much of the discussion in Gender, Morality, and Race in Company India, Sramek argues for a greater emphasis on continuity, as opposed to processes of change, when thinking about the British presence on the subcontinent during the long nineteenth century. Prerebellion British perceptions of gender, morality, and race in India—embodied in an ideology of empire, Sramek's “empire of opinion” (160)—endured even after the East India Company itself ceased to exist. Put bluntly, the suppression of the Great Rebellion of 1857 did not herald entirely new patterns, practices, or preoccupations of imperial rule. Instead, Sramek contends, the imperial attitudes, arrogance, and anxiety historians have readily ascribed to, and identified with, the Raj found their genesis during, and because of, company rule. These interpretations will likely stimulate discussion and debate among scholars of the East India Company and of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British Empire for whom this work should be essential reading.