In their earnest attempt to articulate sonic globalization to the new globalizing wave of the 1990s, scholars have overlooked earlier waves of transnational cultural exchanges and cosmopolitanism. Bradley Shope's American Popular Music in Britain's Raj puts together ethnographic material and archival research to confirm the presence of an entertainment globalization in 19th century India. Through tracing the history of American popular culture including black minstrelsy, ragtime, jazz and Hollywood film music in India to the 1850s, he establishes musical intersections enabled through trilateral flows of American live, recorded and filmed performance genres between the USA, Britain and India during the British Raj, which were supported by global commercial and military enterprises. In doing so, he uncovers alternate trajectories of economic and cultural exchange, globalization, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism that disengage sonic globalization from the Americanization myth. Asserting that the flows of American popular culture were enabled through the improvement in transportation and infrastructural facilities, Shope makes the important point that they were mediated by Britain. He argues that racialized and exoticized African-American musical genres were incorporated in a trilateral consumption culture on which domiciled Europeans, visiting Americans and westernized Indians converged to stake their claims to metropolitan cosmopolitanism.

Shope reproduces the emergence of an entertainment culture in India in the 1850s centred on ballrooms, social clubs, theatres and cinema houses that catered to the social needs of the domiciled Europeans but also became a marker of social status, modernity and cosmopolitanism. Initially produced by amateur regimental bands in clubs in metros as well as smaller cities and towns, the arrival of travelling professional performers kept the audience abreast with current entertainment trends in the US and Britain. Although it began in 1850, African-African minstrel Dave Carson's performance of black minstrelsy in 1865 in Bombay introduced African-American culture, albeit in a distorted form, to a diverse Indian audience. Carson's appeal largely lay in his ability to adapt the genre to local sensibilities by improvising on themes, characters, style and language to the Indian setting through incorporating stereotypes of Indian ethnic communities and Hindi and Bengali words. Along with blackface minstrelsy, ragtime performances came to be included in the same venues following the popularity of ragtime in England and subsequently musical sequences from Hollywood films, particularly cabarets, were fitted in the performances.

Shope avers that these transatlantic African-American musicians and genres were constructed as signifiers of both exoticism and cosmopolitanism for the Indian audience. Demonstrating that the primitivized iconography and nostalgic representations of the American South familiar to Indian audience from Hollywood films and performance genres were appropriated by jazz promoters and musicians in marketing African-American musicians, Shope shows that groups such the Plantation Quartet and shows such as the Show Boat Dance and the Apache Gala conformed to the exoticized version of the idyllic South with the complicity of the musicians. Marketed as exotica and performed in elite venues such as exclusive clubs, theatres and hotels for the consumption of an affluent audience, the ensemble of entertainment comprising, music, dance and food signified a form of European modernity and cosmopolitanism to their consumers. Shope retells a fascinating story of how South Asian listeners in cities like Lucknow and hill stations like Missouri with tastes in western music avidly consumed live broadcasts of performances from cities like Bombay and Calcutta, LP records and sheet music, thereby producing a coterie of American popular music aficionados. Through throwing new light on the role of gramophone and radio, commercial and military, as instruments of modernity and sonic democratization in the era of short wave transmission, he forces a rethink on the mapping of sonic globalization to new media and technologies.

In addition to unpacking the long history of African-American association with India, Shope's book constitutes one of the first book-length studies on the history of jazz in India. Tracing its arrival to the initiative of an enterprising expatriate Maurice Bandman who invited the bands of ship liners in theatres in Bombay as early as 1919, he names the 1930s as the decade when a number of jazz musicians such as Joseph Ghisleri, Herb Flemmings and others travelled to India to perform in hotels in Bombay and Calcutta. It was the African-American members of their group, including Roy Butler, Creighton Thompson, Rudy Jackson and Cricket Smith, who stayed back to inaugurate a local jazz tradition. The most celebrated of these was pianist Teddy Weatherford from Chicago. However, Shope, maintaining that all jazz musicians were not from the US or Europe, provides two case studies – of Ken Mac and Micky Correa – which will be illuminating for readers seeking to trace the origins of Indian jazz musicians. Both of the case studies illustrate that the Anglo-Indian and Goan background of the two musicians in addition to their exposure to western music in school, church or family equipped them to venture into an unfamiliar territory despite severe constraints.

Shope connects the entry of jazz to global economic and political developments such as the depression in the US, the arrival of American soldiers in Calcutta and the setting up of military outposts during World War II. After establishing Bombay and Calcutta as entertainment capitals owing to their strategic position during the British Raj, he distinguishes the jazz experience in Calcutta during the war years by pointing out the anomaly between the unbridled consumption signified by American-style entertainment including food, music and dance and the starving bodies of those outside the elite clubs. In reconstructing the guilty but exciting pleasures associated with the Firpo's Restaurant and Bar that became synonymous with western-style entertainment for decades, he captures the remorse of the visiting Americans but misses out its signification for generations of Calcuttans. His focus on Calcutta, the location for the Gramophone Company of India and a number of radio stations, helps Shope to foreground the crucial role played by recording technologies, companies and military-launched radio stations in disseminating American popular music to widely dispersed railway towns, military bases and other outposts, which created a taste for jazz in these locations.

In discovering the presence of a robust jazz culture in the city of Lucknow introduced by the Civil Services Week in the mid-1930s and nurtured by Lucknow's Goan and Anglo-Indian musicians, Shope brings to light a new site on the American popular music map. Through tracing this Goan trajectory of jazz in India, Shope decouples it from its African American provenance and identifies a vibrant local tradition inspired by musicians in Bombay and Calcutta. Unlike Calcutta and Bombay, the audience consisting of Goan Christians and Anglo-Indians in addition to British and Indians converged on the cantonment clubs and the entertainment hub of Hazratganj and the Mayfair theatre. Shope argues that the audience in Lucknow introduced to jazz through gramophone discs, sheet music and radio descended on Hazratganj to indulge in an activity locally known as ganjing and saw themselves as participating in a cosmopolitan modernity through consumption of American popular music and dance. He asserts that Lucknow's musical history as the capital of the erstwhile Oudh with its legendary hereditary musicians and courtesans equipped its residents, even Indian, to appreciate unfamiliar musical genres. With the British hibernating in the hill stations in the summer months, jazz musicians travelled to perform in clubs in quaint towns like Mussourie, Shimla and Nainital.

Although the eclecticism of Hindi film music has accommodated diverse musical genres since the beginning, Shope's account of the migration of jazz musicians to the Hindi film industry with the decline of a jazz audience after Independence articulates their contributions to the formulation of a new musical idiom that symbolically represented modernity. Secondly, Shope demonstrates that the Anglo-Indian and Goan instrumentalists’ contribution to the musical composition extended beyond arrangement, as it was called in the Hindi film industry, by unpacking the practices of Hindi film music composers. The incorporation of jazz in Hindi film music not only produced some of the most memorable Hindi film songs but also introduced the larger Indian populace to African American music. The cabaret number in the Hindi filmi song and dance sequence visually reproduced the vibrant elite club culture of the 1930s for those who would have had no opportunity to experience it live.

The first full-length study on the nature of American popular music in India, the book breaks new grounds in the history of music and sonic globalization through unpacking an uncharted musical encounter.