Britain, India and the Challenges of Liberal Empire

In a book of splendid scholarship, Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India, Lawrence James traces the rise and fall of the Raj from the early 18^th Century to August 1947.  But beyond narrating British conquest or Gandhi’s noncooperation campaigns, James uses India, the lynchpin of British military might and global dominance, to examine the nature of empire.  Specifically, he focuses on the tense coexistence of Britain’s liberal ideology alongside coercive force in a land that supplied Britain with “markets, prestige, and muscle.”