As a “mixed-race” community, India's Eurasians (or Anglo-Indians as they were officially designated in 1911) occupied what Valerie Anderson calls a “liminal zone, permanently suspended between the numerical power of the Indian population and the political and economic power of the British” (231). Eurasian historiography has, she argues, largely focused either on the early history of the Anglo-Indians or the closing years of British rule, leaving much of the community's nineteenth-century history unconsidered. Writers have accepted many of the hostile racial stereotypes that surrounded Eurasians, blinding them to the social and material reality of their existence. Anderson seeks to redress this prejudicial imbalance by constructing a more objective (but empathetic) account of how India's Eurasians emerged, the nature of their origins, education, and employment, and how they lived their lives under British rule.

She tackles this revisionist task firstly through a careful rereading of the regulations and pronouncements from the 1770s to 1820s that initiated the “othering” of Eurasians and their differentiation alike from Britons and Indians. She argues, contrary to most accepted explanations, that this liminality was not a calculated policy or necessarily an early manifestation of imperial racism, but the unintended consequence of attempts by British policy makers in the wake of the War of American Independence and the Act of Union with Ireland to consolidate British identity, strengthen the political hold on India, and distance the East India Company administration from its Indian subjects. Through a close analysis of complex and often contradictory data, she then investigates the size and composition of the Eurasian population, rejecting smaller estimates, some as low as 100,000, to fix on a likely figure (including the Indo-Portuguese) of 300,000 by 1911.

In the book's most incisive and innovative chapters, Anderson examines relations between Europeans and Eurasians, questioning conventional views about “miscegenation” and immorality. She argues that while historians have assumed that sexual intimacy between Europeans and Indians rapidly declined from the 1830s in the face of moral opprobrium from the European elite, or was confined to concubinage and prostitution, the evidence suggests that marriage (or marriage-like relations) persisted between Indians, Eurasians, and lower-class Europeans throughout the century, and, far from being transient, these relationships were often of a stable and enduring nature. In this analysis race, as it pertains to Eurasian identity, is largely a question of class. Anderson notes, for instance, that whereas the European elite chose to send their young children back to Britain so as to save them from what they saw as the corrupting taint of India and Indians, parents of low-class white and mixed-race children might have their offspring removed from their care and sent to “orphan” schools in order to be brought up in the approved anglicized manner—though this claim does not seem to recognize the extent of mortality among white soldiers, especially in the first half century, or the apparent paucity of children, given the size of the mixed-race community, located in orphan schools and similar institutions.

In the last four chapters, Anderson considers the types of employment Eurasians followed, or, given the pressures and constraints of their position, were obliged to follow. For many of the Eurasian men, employment drew them into a close and dependent relationship with the colonial regime, further distancing them from the bulk of Indian society. They served as clerks, regimental bandsmen, post and telegraph workers, and medical subordinates, or, increasingly from the 1860s, as railwaymen. Eurasians were largely excluded from fighting roles in the army but came to occupy a relatively secure and remunerative niche on the railways and in the isolated townships of railway colonies, sandwiched between a highly paid and privileged European elite and a more numerous but low-paid body of Indian workers. In keeping with class rather than race criteria, Anderson notes, Eurasian women were also expected to follow “useful” occupations and generally worked after marriage, becoming seamstresses, teachers, and nurses. However, because her analysis ends around 1900, she omits the newer opportunities created for Eurasian women through typing and office work and the careers of enterprising Anglo-Indians like the nurses’ leader and municipal councilor Hannah Angelo in Madras in the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed, Anderson is often too reliant on quantitative data (whose problematic nature she does not deny) to tell her story when she might leaven her narrative with court records, newspaper reports, memoirs, and other sources that might more creatively illuminate the Eurasian experience.

This is a rather uneven book. The chapters on “miscegenation” and marriage create a fresh perspective on Eurasian life and engage critically and informatively with both existing historiography and the crude stereotyping of Eurasian morality. But other chapters, like those on employment, appear more perfunctory, rely excessively on secondary sources, and offer little original insight or telling detail. Race lapses into being a statistical category rather than a prejudicial experience or a biological supposition. While Anderson provides ample illustration of the Eurasians as a class, albeit one with strongly racialized connotations, it is unclear where the “power” of her subtitle truly lies. She refers, in passing, to the obligatory recruitment of Eurasians into the armed ranks of India's Auxiliary Force, but provides no instance of their contentious deployment against Indian workers. Nor does she mention the use of Eurasians in the police, another role in which their coercive presence might arouse Indian ire. She seeks, commendably, to give agency to the Eurasians, but in the end they seem to have little ability, in employment as in public life, to command their own destiny. Perhaps that is a realistic, if unsatisfying, assessment. That said, though, this book is an important contribution to rethinking the place of Eurasians in British India and it raises significant questions about evidence and methodology in seeking to revisit and reframe their identity.