A long awaited volume in the New Cambridge History of India series, Barbara Ramusack's The Indian Princes and Their States gives us a comprehensive and authoritative account of the princely state system under the British Raj in India. Much has been written, over the years, about India's princes and their doings. Much of this, Orientalist in tone, has emphasized the princes’ exoticism and extravagance. Other accounts have focused on British policy toward the princes and have traced out in detail its changing contours—from the initial creation of complaisant princes as buffers against still hostile Indian powers to Dalhousie's annexationism to the post-Mutiny guarantees that secured the princes on their thrones until the coming of independence.

In this volume Ramusack incorporates all of these familiar stories, and more, into a wide-ranging narrative that takes us from the emergence of the princely states as independent entities in the eighteenth century, in the wake of Mughal decline, to the princes’ increasingly desperate attempts to stave off integration into a Congress-ruled India. British relations with the princes are inevitably central. As a scholar who has studied the politics of the Chamber of Princes in her earlier work, Ramusack skillfully weaves together the Raj's changing policy imperatives with the larger structure of “indirect rule” in colonial India. She insists that the British did not “create” India's princes out of thin air, but she acknowledges that Britain's creation of the treaty system did “shape” their states and defined the increasingly restricted options open to them (48–49, 85). In her account of the working of indirect rule, Ramusack accepts much of David Cannadine's contested notion that the British accepted the princes as their “social equals,” but at the same time she is in no doubt that the British insisted always on their own superiority and ordered the princes’ activities to achieve their own objectives (92, 115). Ramusack might well have been even more critical of Cannadine's willful blindness to British racism. As she remarks of Curzon, for him the princes were never equals, but “a set of unruly and ignorant and rather undisciplined schoolboys” (165).

Apart from narrating their relations with the British, any historian writing a history of India's princely states faces enormous difficulties. The problem in part is that there are simply too many of them, by some count (for many were tiny principalities) over five hundred; each state of course had its own ruler and its own history. Further, princely archives are not well organized, or in some cases have been dispersed altogether, so that much has to be inferred or can only be hinted at. Here Ramusack has adopted the only feasible strategy—that of careful generalization on particular topics, with her argument illuminated by closer study of select examples, usually drawn from the larger states, such as Hyderabad, Mysore, and Baroda. She devotes chapters in turn to princely patronage, the administrative and economic structures of the states, and popular political activity, especially in the later 1930s as the Congress extended its operations to them, together with glances at communal and peasant movements.

Much of the material in these chapters is fresh and full of insight into what Ramusack calls the “internal evolution” of these states as distinct administrative units. Her account of the states’ administrative structures reminds us, for instance, of the opportunities these states provided for ambitious educated Indians who, like Aziz in E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, were denied responsible positions under the British. But British interference was an ever-present reality. In mining, manufacturing, and railways alike, Ramusack points out how the British stopped princely schemes they did not like and were “indifferent to their princely allies when unscrupulous investors concluded questionable deals” (199). Ramusack steers away from the vexed question of whether the princely states can be seen as providing an “alternative” modernity to that of British India. She accepts the notion that there existed a handful of “progressive” princely states, most notably Baroda, Mysore, and Travancore, and she alludes briefly to one intriguing experiment in vernacular education, the Nizam's creation in Hyderabad of an Urdu-medium university, the first and only one of its kind in India. But what a “progressive” strategy meant, apart from administrative bureaucratization, with some support of irrigation and industry, is not made clear. The book would have been strengthened if Ramusack had more critically assessed what being “modern” or “progressive” meant for individual princes, as well as appraising the princes’ overall success, or failure, in creating effective state structures. A fuller consideration of these issues might help explain why India's princes, unlike, say, comparably situated rulers in Malaya or Northern Nigeria, collapsed so completely at independence.

Ramusack's account of the coming of independence, and the abortive movement for federation of princely and British India, based as it is on her own research, is a welcome introduction to the always puzzling question of why the princes backed away from a federal state that was clearly in their long-term interest. Ramusack makes clear that the British, many of whom were eager to exploit princely “ambivalence,” played a substantial role in this foot-dragging. But, in the end, she concludes, the princes, each jockeying for advantage, “could not stand together and therefore they would be integrated individually” (272). Oddly, Ramusack says very little about the extended process of arm-twisting that finally brought the states into the new dominions after August 1947 and, with the Kashmir maharaja's accession to India, provoked an enduring hostility between the two new states.

Since this book is in some degree meant as a reference work, it is frustrating not to have any comprehensive list in tabular form of the major princes, organized by salute, state size, population, and so on. The one map is unsatisfactory. Several of the illustrations (see especially those on 160 and 178) lack sufficient contrast to be worth reproduction. The book otherwise is produced up to the high standard associated with the New Cambridge Histories. Anyone seeking to understand India's princely states must begin by reading this thoughtful volume.