Eurocentric world histories have been increasingly scorned in recent decades, not least by historians of Asia. Adapting a Braudelian approach, scholars such as K. N. Chaudhuri (Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 [Cambridge, 1985]) argued for the rise of a global economy in Asia, centered on the development of a regular and complex long-distance transoceanic trading complex in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea well before the European “Voyages of Discovery” occurred. Chaudhuri and like-minded scholars argue that European ascendancy in the Indian Ocean occurred only since the mid-eighteenth century; Andre Gunder Frank (ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age [Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1998]) considered that European dominance was achieved only in the nineteenth century.

More recently, Sugata Bose (A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire [Cambridge, MA, and London, 2006]) and now Metcalf contend that Asia remained a vital force until the Depression of the 1930s. Bose argues that in the late eighteenth century, Britain achieved economic and political dominance throughout the Indian Ocean region, but not hegemony. Rather, what Bose terms an indigenous “bazaar nexus,” lying between the top layer of European “capital” and a bottom layer comprising “peasants, peddlars and pawnbrokers,” operated in a dynamic and sustained fashion throughout the Indian Ocean region. Largely invisible to Europeans, but highly visible to the peoples of the Indian Ocean, it was less of a “world” system than an “interregional” system, in which the exchange of “ideas” and “culture” was as important as the exchange of commodities.

In this book, Metcalf takes this argument a step further, contending that India was essential to the maintenance of British imperialism over a vast swathe of the globe from Africa to Mesopotamia to Malaya to Hong Kong and beyond. During the critical years of the founding of the modern British Empire, from 1860 to 1920, Metcalf argues, Britain called upon Indian models of administration, law, and architecture, as well as upon “Indian” personnel, from British officers and engineers who gained their formative experience in India to Indian clerks, soldiers, and unskilled laborers, as well as traders, to establish colonial rule throughout this sphere.

Metcalf's research, largely based on British colonial archives, is painstaking and detailed. His thesis is seductive. India did indeed play an important role in the making of the modern British Empire. However, the novelty of this concept is rather overplayed, for India had long been central to British imperial ambitions and power in the region—as is reflected in the bitter and prolonged battle between the French and British for control of the subcontinent during the eighteenth century, following the collapse of Mughal power. Similarly underplayed is the very long history of Indian influence throughout this region; Indian “models” (from administration to religion and law) and Indian personnel were evident from East Africa to Indonesia from at least the early centuries CE. Moreover, as the author admits, concepts such as “indirect rule” were not necessarily based on British policy toward the princely states in India, while colonial administrations outside India proved highly pragmatic in their use of Indian models of administration and of Indian personnel, adapting or rejecting as circumstance demanded.

More significantly, Metcalf, like Bose and other Asia-centrist scholars, overestimates the centricity of India and underestimates the significance of other regions in the Indian Ocean arena. Nowhere is this clearer than in his treatment of Africa, to which, like Bose, he claims to give major attention—Metcalf devotes two chapters to the Indian connection with Africa that periodically looms large elsewhere in this volume. Largely ignoring two millennia of Indian contact with East Africa, and of East African contact with India, Metcalf treats Africa as if it were a new discovery for Indians. He also focuses on sometimes peripheral topics, such as the minority opinion of Harry Johnston that East Africa might prove an “America for the Hindu.” All is India-centered—one of Metcalf's chapters is entitled “India in East Africa.” However, in Metcalf's view, “far-off Africa” (111) initially proved a deterrent to Indians who, once they did become interested in settling “on the far side of a vast ocean” (195), were increasingly frustrated by white colonialists. Throughout the work, Africans are largely invisible.

In sum, this volume will prove informative to those interested in the Indian history of the world. However, those interested in Indian interaction with the rest of the Indian Ocean world will be disappointed on two major counts: first, this work fails to adequately establish the rich historical context for Indian activity in the Indian Ocean, and second, due to a narrow focus, largely derived from an Asia-centric viewpoint and the tunnel vision of the British colonial mentality upon which the author relies for his source material, it fails to explore in any meaningful way Indian relations with other peoples of the Indian Ocean region.