The English Gentleman at Work, a close study of the private Eurasian trade of East India Company servants in early Madras, sets out to do many things: to treat these traders on their own terms, apart from their roles as company employees or in the growth of the British Empire in India; to challenge a prevailing “indocentric” (p. 281) approach to this history by insisting that London capital and its networks were far more important to this trade than “local” factors; to envision Asia and the Atlantic as part of one culturally and commercially coherent early modern British empire; and to challenge our existing notions about the relationship between the English East India Company and its servants' private commercial activities. The glue that cements these arguments—and the merchant communities of Madras and London for that matter—is the idea of “gentlemanly capitalism,” the complementary relationship between financial interest and cultural values and behavior that P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins have identified as the fundament of modern British imperial expansion. For Søren Mentz, the Englishman in Madras was never an immigrant to India, but always as an inseparable part of a global community of Britons in “diaspora.”

Consciously avoiding the usual reliance on the company's archives, which can often be misleading on the subject of private trade, Mentz has mined collections of papers in various locations in England (and a few in Scotland), including the multivolume account and letter books of Madras Governor Thomas “Diamond” Pitt, the interloper-turned-Madras-governor and patriarch of the famous eighteenth-century British political family. While this seems to skew his findings towards the serendipity of the extant sources, the research here certainly persuades that connections to London, and the financial and epistolary instruments that maintained those relationships, were critical for establishing and sustaining an English private trader in Madras. It also importantly humanizes these traders, who appear here neither as rapacious proto-imperialists nor as impudent bunglers but as men, and a few women, who went great distances and put themselves to great personal and financial risks to make a profit, while never separating themselves from the culture and communities at home.

Unfortunately, the more sweeping claims in this book do not always go as far or as deep as one might hope. The issue perhaps most interesting for the nonspecialist is the notion that the British activities in the Americas and Asia can be seen as part of one early British empire. This is a welcome intervention, as the British Atlantic and Asia continue unnecessarily to be treated as distinct, the former supposedly germane to a “first” British empire of settlement and the latter to a “second” British empire of conquest. This book does show some apt parallels between trade in the American colonies and Madras, yet sometimes the argument is undercut by the inclusion of some more superficial resemblances, such as the comparison between “absentee landlords” and slave owners in the Caribbean and “absentee” former company servants with assets in trust back in India (pp. 278–79). More importantly, it seems that an argument about a “cultural unity” that links the British empire into one “common historical process” (p. 262) would demand exploring that process further, through not just comparisons but communications, interactions, and integrations, such as the American connections of two Madras governors from this period, Elihu Yale and Nathaniel Higginson, both native New Englanders. Of course, such an approach may be precluded prima facie by Mentz's vision, like that of Cain and Hopkins, of a British Empire that is by nature centripetal, with “peripheries” linked directly and primarily to a clear financial and cultural metropolitan “core,” what Mentz often calls the “mother country.”

Furthermore, in emphasizing the coherence of the diaspora, this book underemphasizes the confessional, political, commercial, and personal fissures, such as those between company servants and interlopers, that often arose within that community. Exposing these would not contradict the argument here but complicate and perhaps complement it, revealing how “gentility” and “capitalism” might persist and transform within an Anglo-Indian context. Conversely, this book may also have passed over opportunities for enriching its occasionally modest description of the reproduction of the English cultural context at Madras by exploring that city's civic institutions, such as the Anglican church vestry or the city corporation. Finally, it is worth observing that the power and authority of the argument is occasionally hindered by inherently minor editorial mishaps or mistakes. For example, we find Yale's fortune going to a university in Boston, not Connecticut (p. 224), and company governor Josiah Child (who actually spelled his own name Josia) appearing on more than one occasion as Joshia.

As a history of private trade in Madras, this book documents the underestimated importance of London in the life of private traders in Madras. In his broader suggestions, Mentz seems to have intuited some crucial observations about communities of Britons abroad in this period and the nature of the early modern British Empire. That the book does not seem to develop these ideas as thoroughly as one might hope is frustrating, but it is also testimony to the exciting potential of the ideas in the first place.