The history of the Indian “Mutiny” has failed to find its E. P. Thompson, but in Salahuddin Malik's 1857 we encounter a compelling account of Briton's reactions to the events that occurred on the subcontinent some five-thousand miles distant. Malik's book, steeped in the archives, is a sober narrative that avoids sensationalism or polemics and offers genuine insights.

For those seeking a history of 1857, this is not the book; Malik assumes knowledge of the events that started on 10 May in Meerut and spread to Delhi, Kanpur, Lucknow, and other parts of the Northwest Provinces. This book delves deep into the British archive to chart “reactions” to the uprising. Malik patiently sorts through the debates among Britons about the causes of the uprising and those responsible for provoking or igniting it. In pursuing his topic, Malik has left no stone unturned: he appears to have read virtually every book and pamphlet (241 listed in his bibliography), newspaper (13), periodical (38), sermon, religious tract, Parliamentary debate, and speech written on the Indian “Mutiny” between 1857–61. While the period under scrutiny here is brief—the fourteen months from May 1857 to August 1858, when the administration of India was transferred from the East-India Company (EIC) to Her Majesty's government—it is a rich one, for it upended many givens.

Malik identifies three “schools” of thought that emerged about the causes of the rebellion and the parties that subscribed to each: the mutiny school, the revolution or civil rebellion adherents, and those who believed the uprising was a Muslim conspiracy. The Whigs, The Times and Manchester Guardian, shareholders of the EIC, civil servants in India, and Evangelicals such as Shaftesbury insisted that the events in India were merely a military mutiny. Citing the “petting” of sepoys (23–24) and the loss of contact between officers and men, “the mutiny school spent all its energies emphasizing the anomalies in the army administration of India and so tried to build, though with only partial success, its thesis of army insurrection” (18–19). These proponents agreed in their diagnosis but differed in assigning responsibility: some argued that loss of pensions and low salaries aggrieved sepoys; others suggested that the EIC policy of annexations, especially the annexation of Awadh (Oudh) stirred sepoys; yet others, especially Palmerston and V. A. Smith, president of the Board of Control, stoutly denied that annexations played any role in sepoy discontent (37–40). As Malik drily points out, Palmerston and Smith had been vociferous advocates of annexation in the past.

If justifying their actions or covering up their culpability motivated some members of this school, so did their disagreements with what Malik calls the “revolution school.” This latter group consisted of the Conservative Party, especially Disraeli; the press; missionaries such as Alexander Duff; Irish nationalists; Chartists; and “moralists” (61). They denied that the uprising was merely a mutiny—in Disraeli's words to the Commons, “such results are occasioned by adequate causes, and by an accumulation of adequate causes” (64)—and listed the social, religious, economic, and political discontent that they argued all Indians experienced. Most argued that Indians’ strongest grievance was political: the conquests, confiscations, and abolition or curtailments of pensions, but most especially the annexations, particularly that of Awadh that abrogated an 1801 treaty (83).

Malik indicates that the arguments of the revolution school were always stronger, while those of the mutiny school got tangled in self-contradictions (60). He argues that the revolution school prevailed, as evidenced by “the Queen's Indian Proclamation, issued by the Derby-Disraeli government. The Proclamation had ‘frankly and manfully’ admitted that ambitious men had led their countrymen into ‘open rebellion’; and that the Queen's power ‘has been shown by the suppression of that rebellion’” (111). Malik's arguments and evidence are persuasive, but one is left wondering why 1857, until today, is known as the “Indian Mutiny” (since 2003, three new trade volumes have appeared with the words “Indian Mutiny” in the title).

The final strain Malik identifies is the Muslim conspiracy school, which appears less like a distinct school than a skein traversing the entire debate. Malik writes: “The adherents of this school came from all shades of public opinion. Indeed, if there was anything on which a large majority of the first two groups, the [mutiny and revolution], as well as others, agreed, it was in calling the outbreak a long-planned Muslim conspiracy for the overthrow of the British and the restoration of Muslim rule in India. … From the Church of England Magazine through the Manchester Guardian, The Scotsman down to The Free Press; … from the pulpit down to the completely secular platform, all agreed in pronouncing it as a Muslim rebellion” (138–39).

I have done little justice to the wealth of rich and absorbing material Malik has unearthed: the critiques of the EIC and missionaries, the Indian army and the British administration of India; the condescension toward Hindus and anxiety about Muslims; the ancillary debates that sprung up during the months of the rebellion. Malik culls the essential arguments and distills them effortlessly. The book is well worth one's attention.

It is, however, ill-served by its title and marketing. The former does not do justice to Malik's thesis and investigations, while the subtitle “War of Independence or Clash of Civilizations?” refers to only two of the three positions Malik highlights—the revolution school and the Muslim conspiracy school—but leaves out reference to the mutiny position that occupies a central place in the debates and book. The title was likely selected for its echo of Huntington and reference to the supposed “clash of civilizations” that 9/11 revealed anew. In an epilogue Malik draws a parallel between 1857 and our post-9/11 world, but the chapter lacks just what makes the bulk of this book so strong: its precision and specificity, its grounding in a particular historical moment and archive. 1857 comes with an impressive set of endorsements by Akbar Ahmed, John Esposito, and Anand Yang, who praise it for its timeliness and trenchant insight into the “dangers of Islamophobia” (Esposito, xx). These introductions prepare one for a very different book—a polemic—which, luckily for scholars of 1857, it is not.