The causes, events, and aftermath of the 1857–58 violence in northern India have undergone considerable analysis in scores of books and hundreds of articles, from that time to the present. In Amit Kumar Gupta's contribution to this rich and extensive historiographical debate, he repeatedly identifies this as “the civil war [between] Indian feudal elements and the British bourgeoisie” (p. 5; also pp. 140, 160, 168). He also uses other more widely used concepts like the Great Revolt, Mutiny, and Great Rebellion, but not the more Indian nationalist “First War for Indian Independence” or the subalternist concept of a peasant insurgency against British and Indian elite oppression.

Gupta begins Nineteenth-Century Colonialism and the Great Indian Revolt with an antescript that explains his efforts “to understand some of the twentieth-century developments in India,” especially its contradictory modernity and yet continuing “medieval shackles” (p. 5). Then, over the course of the book, he argues that during the rule of the English East India Company (r. 1757–1857), British Utilitarians attempted “the bourgeoization (or modernization or Westernization) of a medievalistic, status-quoist feudal [Indian] society” (p. 4) and economy. Especially under “two of its benevolent despots [Governors-General] Bentinck and Dalhousie, India marched infrastructurally into the modern world of steam, arterial roadways, posts and telegraphs, and the railways” (p. 33) and also of Anglicizing education and a capitalist system of agriculture. This economic and social progress was intended by the Companyraj (sic, passim) to benefit India, but even more so the British imperial world system.

Growing resentment of British economic disruption by Indian princes and landlords (supported by their agricultural tenants), however, fueled the incendiary violence that was sparked by mutinies by Indian sepoys (semi-anglicized soldiers) splutteringly at Vellore (in South India) in 1806 and then far more widely at Meerut (in North India) in 1857, Gupta argues. He largely presumes his readers’ knowledge of the events of 1857–58. Instead, he focuses on what he sees as these broad processes and their significance, especially with respect to British colonial policies that shaped and reshaped Indian society.

Once the “popular anti-imperialist feudal upsurge in India had blown over” (p. 152), the British crown reversed the policies of the Companyraj. Under the British Raj (1858–1947), “the Indian people were subjected suddenly to the dual control of metropolitan [British] capitalism and indigenous [Indian] feudalism—a joint venture of both the external and the internal exploiters, the senior and the junior partners…” (p. 5). This condition largely continued, Gupta asserts, until Indian independence. Gupta concludes with a postscript that describes his motivations for his “modest searches into some of the socio-economic and political literature of this time, and [his] attempts at following the leads of [British] speculative discourses thereafter…” (p. 167) through writing this book.

Gupta uses some archival and many of the relevant secondary sources. General readers and scholars already have access to an extensive body of books and articles about 1857–58 that use a broad array of methodologies and ideologies. Those seeking an innovative interpretation of the significance of the 1857–58 events for India and for the British Empire will find much to ponder in Nineteenth-Century Colonialism and the Great Indian Revolt.