Even in the increasingly crowded field of introductory historical texts on modern South Asia, Subalterns and Raj stands out as a major and excellent addition. It is marked by two distinctive features. First, Crispin Bates is acutely aware that he writes in the context in which, in the West, imperial ventures are once again popularly acceptable, and colonialism itself is much more respectable. Indeed, the book was “conceived as offering a riposte to the sentimental, colonialist recollections of the British raj in India … which still plague popular history writing in Britain. Such writing … encourages the irresponsibilities of foreign policy in the present” (p. x). Second, Bates seeks to be especially attentive to “subaltern and South Asian perspectives” while being attentive to “the recognisable signposts of South Asian history, most often deriving from the machinations of the elites” (p. x).

What follows is a remarkable accomplishment—a survey that is very accessible but nevertheless thoughtful, deeply argumentative, and marked by several critical insights. Eschewing the usual practice of starting around either 1757 or 1857, the survey takes account of the Mughal period. Indeed, some its strongest chapters are the early ones, in which Bates's account of Mughal decline and the rise of the British stresses especially the role of European rivalries and even more of “Indian merchant intermediaries who played a crucial role by financing the political opponents of the emperor” (p. 33). He points out that the consolidation of British rule in the eighteenth century was to some degree the result of “highly fortuitous circumstances” (p. 36), such as the victories of Plassey and the weakening of the Mughals and the Marathas as a result of the battle of Buxar.

Bates is very critical of the colonial endeavor, stressing the “rapaciousness” (p. 35) of early colonial rule, insisting that colonial nineteenth-century reforms around land, education, sati, and female infanticide were not so much “for the benefit of the Indians” as “entirely undertaken for the convenience” of the British (p. 43). Again, dealing with the late nineteenth century, he provides detailed examples of how “the Indian economy was run in the interests of the British” (p. 86). Turning to the twentieth century, his survey suggests that while “the rhetoric of late colonial rule was one of ‘preparing’ Indians for self-government” (p. 107), “[u]ntil the very end, the British government appears to have made skilful use of constitutional maneuverings to avert decolonization rather than prepare for it” (p. 109).

The discussion of the nationalist movement is remarkable for its nuance and attention to detail while distilling a narrative that is especially attentive to movements from below, to the role of rumor in the spread of these movements, and to the way in which more elite political parties appropriated these movements. Across these chapters, Bates effectively argues that “genuine mass activism in the Indian national struggle was often to be seen in inverse proportion to the efforts made by political elites to organize campaigns—campaigns that invariably were more conservative in form” (p. 164).

Shifting to postindependence India, the book also provides an excellent critical analysis of social and economic change in the Nehruvian era. For the post-Nehruvian period, it provides a suggestive analysis of the rise of regional parties and secessionist movements.

With a survey of this sort, it is all too easy (and perhaps unfair) to find themes that have been omitted or could have been discussed differently. If one were to nevertheless yield to the temptation, then it might be said that the two chapters that Bates devotes to Sri Lanka and Pakistan and Bangladesh do not seem to sit well with the rest of the book. While both are admirably concise surveys of the postindependence histories of these countries, they are too brief, and this forces Bates to eschew the kind of analysis of social processes that marks his chapters on colonial South Asia or postindependence India.

Even some of the chapters on India (and especially in the ones dealing with the post-Nehruvian era) are too often dominated by a political narrative centered on the state and political parties. Thus, while there is discussion of the ways in which the state and political parties were transformed by the rise of Hindu-Muslim tensions in nineteenth- and twentieth-century India, or the rise of the lower castes in postindependence India, there is little consideration of these transformations as cultural, social, and political processes in their own right. Perhaps paying less attention to the state and political parties would have left more space for considering such processes, which, after all, are central to thinking subalternity.

But these caveats aside, the book is remarkably appropriate as a provocation with which to teach modern South Asia history in the contemporary moment in Britain and the United States. What makes Subalterns and Raj all the more attractive is the way it backs its unobtrusive invocation of scholarly debates by an extensive bibliography separately for each chapter in order to encourage students to further explore these debates.