This book aims to describe the rule of the Viceroys of India. Almost a
quarter of the book sets out the background from the earliest times to
1858 and deals with the Governors General and their predecessors. The
remainder works through the Viceroys with particular regard to the
struggle for Indian independence. The last 90 years of the raj is wellworn
territory and the chief theme of this book is the part the Viceroys
played in this. The content is businesslike but unremarkable. The
problems faced by the Viceroys are recognised and as a result the later
Viceroys emerge better than one might have expected and even
Dalhousie gets a more generous treatment than most historians would
allow.
The problem with this book is not so much its content as its
presentation. The author’s style is informal and more suited to the
medium of television than the world of scholarly books. There are
tendencies to mis-statement and overstatement. First, mis-statement:
the East India Company was not ‘owned by the British government’ in
1661 (p30) - there was no British government then, and the English
government never owned the Company. And overstatement: ‘The
British nineteenth-century military mind had not moved on since the
Crusades’ - (pi25). Where for example does the New Model Army fit
into this? - or Marlborough? or Wellington?
The matter is not helped by three factors: the author’s lack of cited
sources; his viscous prose; and his publisher’s failure to sub-edit. There
are hardly any sources identified and when there are they are usually
secondary ones. As to the author’s prose, what are we to make of
sentences like ‘Lytton’s declaration to the Assemblage had rung certain
enough’ (pi97)? Whose fault is this sentence? And what of ‘Zetland
was at a loss with anything but the theatre of his office playing to an
almost empty theatre’ (p346) - Eh? One deep calleth another, perhaps,
but can a theatre play to a theatre? Even the subtitle of the book: ‘The
creation of the British’ is opaque.
And then the misprints, inconsistencies and the complete muddle with
the endnotes in Chapters XI and XII. One note includes the words ‘TO
COME’ which I interpret as a notice to the author or other editors that
more text will be needed here. Dalhousie progresses from a
marquessate to an earldom. Names are misspelled (Hearsey or Hearsy
on the same page?), and even dates are wrong (Canning Viceroy in
1758). I have never seen a book with so many mistakes. The author
follows in the footsteps of two earlier books on the Viceroys. The better
of these The Viceroys o f India by Mark Bence-Jones was astonishingly
also published by Constable, but this was in 1982 before they were
swallowed up by Little, Brown & Co and when they still had competent
sub-editors. It is more scholarly, better argued, better illustrated, better
bound and presented, and frankly in no way superseded by the present
volume.
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