This is a fascinating study of various groups of philanthropists and reformers, operating primarily between the 1820s and the late 1860s, who contributed to making the case for what later became Indian economic nationalism. Its main theme is the rise and crisis of a certain set of liberal hopes and accompanying rhetoric, on which the British Empire’s reputation of fairness had to an extent relied. It consists of seven chapters, starting from the ‘conservationist’ campaigns of those who wished to challenge the ‘Anglicisation’ of India, and protect existing Indian political structures and practices from further British interference, which they felt would be counterproductive or even destructive. The second chapter examines the rhetorical strategies of the ‘conservationists’, focusing on allegations that, by manipulating Indian princes for the purposes of the East India Company, the latter reduced the former to a state of ‘virtual slavery’. This line of argument relied on the rhetorical strategies and political capital of the anti-slavery movement, which had secured a significant success in 1833. Chapter iii examines the imperial reformers’ critique of the Company’s neglect of public works, including irrigative canal building, which was essential for the preservation of society from catastrophic droughts. Chapter iv examines what the author regards as attempts to create a British and Indian ‘civil society’ strong enough to impose checks and balances on irresponsible government. Facilitated by the development of an intra-regional newspaper press in the English language, George Thompson in Calcutta and others, including the Bombay Association (led by Dadabhai Naoroji and Nowrozjee Furdoonjee), started debates about perceived forms of misgovernment and the way to reform them. The great uprising of 1857–8 and its repression interrupted such endeavours and caused much soul-searching among radicals and liberals in Britain, including men such as John Bright and Richard Cobden. Among these liberals, predictably, John Stuart Mill does not emerge in a very positive light. As a high-ranking East India Company official, he was a critic of the conservationists, and had no time for the preservation of the princely states which Governor-General Dalhousie dethroned. Chapter v is about the empire and the ‘law of nations’ and raises interesting issues such as the concept of ‘semi-sovereignty’ and ‘divisible’ sovereignty (associated with Henry Maine). Chapter vi examines the arguments about poverty and deindustrialisation – recurrent themes among Indian critics of the empire – and chapter vii focuses on the unfolding of free-trade liberal reformism, when the Manchester manufacturers failed to rise to Bright and Cobden’s hope that they would somehow help to deter arbitrary colonial governance (they had an interest in the development of Indian cotton, but, unsurprisingly, not in the conditions under which labourers were forced to produce it). The book will hold its place as a useful contribution to the study of British liberalism’s complex relationship with the empire. Particularly interesting are the debates sparked off in the 1860s by W. C. Bonnarjee and E. B. Eastwick on India’s suitability for representative government – with the former advocating imperial federation, the latter some form of limited representation for Indian regions at Westminster (pp. 255–7). Both rejected Mill’s notion that India was not fit for representative government and insisted on the old principle that ‘taxation without representation’ lacks legitimacy. Where this leaves the reputation of the great ‘apostle of Liberalism’ is a question the author does not discuss, but this work will certainly contribute to the wider debate on the cultural and ideological limitations not of liberalism as such, but of the forms of liberalism advocated by mainstream, ‘canonical’ thinkers.