According to its editors, this collection of essays explores the lasting effects of Britain's occupation of India “by juxtaposing the global with the local, but in ways that do justice to the often contingent and frequently unstable relationship between the two” (2–3). After briefly summarizing the major trends in the historiography of this encounter over the last thirty years, the editors present the essay collection as a corrective to the earlier shortcomings of the Cambridge School, which focused on collaboration of colonial and imperial elites; the Subaltern School, which espoused a Gramscian bottom-up approach to colonial encounters; and the effect of the cultural turn, whose focus on the importance of knowledge creation often deprived Indians of agency in its analysis. The fact that many of the contributors to this book are highly regarded, well-established scholars of Britain's occupation of India immediately guarantees the book's importance for other scholars in the field. It does not fail to deliver, because many of the essays provide original arguments thoroughly taking account of the strengths and weaknesses of the past thirty years of historical scholarship.

As with many collections of essays, however, this one has problems with cohesion. The introduction emphasizes the need to transcend the last thirty years of historiographical analysis while building on its foundations. All of these essays do both to a certain degree, but the balance between original argument and historiographical reflection varies markedly among them. For instance, Douglas Peers's “State, Power, and Colonialism” argues, against the grain of most previous scholarship, that India's primary imperial function was neither as a source of cash crops nor as a market for British manufactures. Rather it was a garrison state, whose early nineteenth-century monopolistic control of cash crop exports served the purpose of securing British economic and military supremacy throughout Asia and the Indian Ocean. In making this argument, Peers sites numerous primary, including archival, sources. At the opposite extreme, Sumit Sarkar's “Nationalisms in India” argues for the complexity and diversity of national identities but cites only one source from the period of Britain's occupation. Not surprisingly, most of his essay is a synthesis, referring to historical scholarship, mainly over the last twenty years.

Nevertheless, the essays do a remarkably good job of supporting one another's arguments. David Washbrook's essay, “The Indian Economy and the British Empire,” reinforces Peers's argument about India as a garrison state, and in the concluding chapter, Nandini Gooptu emphasizes the distorting effect that British military structures had on the political evolution of the Raj's successor states, particularly Pakistan. In between, the collection touches on most aspects of the last thirty years of historical analysis of India and Indians under British occupation. The variety of such analyses is as wide as that in the historical discipline generally; including culture (whether literary, material, or visual), identity (whether national, religious, class, or caste), gender, and diaspora studies.

If these areas form familiar components of the “cultural turn” in historical scholarship, the collection does not neglect the sciences. In “Networks of Knowledge,” Mark Harrison displaces the old Eurocentric paradigm, of science flowing outward from the metropole to the periphery, by positing an interchange of ideas among the publishing scientists of the West and the largely anonymous sources of scientific knowledge in Asia. This process simultaneously enriched the knowledge of both societies while creating the impression that only one of them was contributing to its creation. Similarly, Mahesh Rangarajan shows how Britain's encounter with India's stunning ecological variety and environmental extremes shaped British and Indian societies alike, forcing the former to confront new challenges and reshaping the latter with incalculable and often devastating results.

That many of these approaches reinforce one another is apparent in the overlapping themes of these essays. For instance, by showing the causal relationship between environmental issues and peasant protest, Rangarajan's essay addresses identity politics and the garrison state. Similarly, by exploring the construction of scientific knowledge in the context of British hegemony, Harrison situates his argument solidly within the cultural turn of historical scholarship. Such overlaps are even more obvious, and expected, in the essays on culture, identity, gender, and diaspora. For instance, Christopher Pinney taps into a wealth of scholarship to show how museums presented not only the Eurocentric construction of Eastern scientific knowledge but also the Anglo-centric construction of Indian and British identities. By contrast, much of Javeed Majeed's analysis of South Asian literature reveals the indigenous creation of identities among the “othered” in the context and aftermath of British colonial rule. A significant concern of his examination of the scholarly literature on this subject is the extent to which various elements of Indian literature draw on or predate the British presence. The overlap of gender and politics is yet another theme apparent in the last thirty years of scholarship on the Indo-British relationship, whether focused on British administrators in India attempting to feminize certain Indian ethnic groups or on feminists in Britain using empire to advance their causes. Both Tanika Sarkar and Vijay Prashad touch on these themes, among many others, in their essays on gender and diaspora, respectively.

India and the British Empire therefore makes a valuable contribution to the field of its title by presenting up-to-date assessments of the wide variety of scholarly approaches used to understand the impact of India's period of British occupation on both the occupied and the occupier. Considering the diversity of topics addressed, the essays fit together remarkably well, albeit not perfectly. The book will make a worthy addition in graduate seminars particularly, but also to the collection of anyone who desires to stay current on the scholarship of the lasting impact that the Indo-British encounter has had on Britain, India, and the world.