Peace, Poverty and Betrayal: A New History of British India
Roderick Matthews, £25, 416 pages, Hurst London
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Nations are sometimes formed not from within but by invaders. Just as Germany was created by Napoleon, so India, as a unified political entity, was the creation of the British. This fact creates understandable anguish, both among the great majority of British intellectuals, who writhe with embarrassment at the imperial past, and those Indian historians who wish to represent British intervention in their country’s affairs, from 1600-1947, as an uninterrupted sequence of exploitative acts of violent piracy.
