The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj

About this book

For nearly 200 years a small group of British officials administered vast areas of south Asia. In 1900 just over a thousand civil servants ruled a population of nearly 300 million people spread over a territory now covered by India, Pakistan, Burma and Bangladesh. This absorbing book traces their lives from recruitment to retirement, from a jungle to Government House, from a bungalow in Burma to a Residency in Rajputana. It describes their work and their leisure, their intellectual and their private lives, explaining their reasons for going to India and what they did when they got there. The result is a portrait more varied and complicated than that painted by their old admirers, and yet fairer and subtler than those routinely produced by postcolonial detractors.

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