With the steady growth of interest in the history of India under the British, interpretations have emerged, and they may sharply alter much of our thinking about Indian nationalism and British Imperialism. Some of these historical revisions, and the conclusions which may flow from them, are illustrated by the essays in this book. All of them grapple with questions of Indian political organization in different parts of the British Raj. They enquire how these organizations worked at different level; in the towns and in the countryside, in the provinces and in the subcontinent itself. They examine how these kinds of politics came to be bonded together into what were called 'nationalist' movements. They suggest that the interplay between these movements and British Imperialism was very much more ambiguous than has been commonly supposed. All these essays are preliminary announcements of findings which will later appear in longer versions.

The essays in this book were originally published together as a special issue of the Journal of Modern Asian Studies, released in July 1981. They are reprinted here in their entirety. The essays are concerned with the ways in which Britain's imperial connection with India impinged upon the political, economic and social development of the subcontinent in the first half of the twentieth century.

Through his teaching in the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, Jack Gallagher was a major influence on a generation of students of empire. His re-interpretation of the nature of British imperialism, most notably in Africa and the Victorians (written with Ronald Robinson) stimulated much debate. His pupil and colleague Anil Seal has edited for this volume a group of Professor Gallagher’s major essays: the unpublished Ford Lectures on the British Empire, and related papers on Africa, India and imperialism. The collection will be welcomed by all concerned with the history of empire throughout what Gallagher saw as its decline, its subsequent rise and its eventual administrative fall.

In this volume Dr Seal analyses the social roots of the rather confused stirrings towards political organisations of the 1870s and 1880s which brought about the foundation of the Indian National Congress. He is concerned not only with the politicians, viceroys and civil servants but with the social structure of those parts of India where political movements were most prominent at the time. The emphasis of this work is more upon Indian politics than upon British policy: the associations in Bengal and Bombay, the genesis of the Congress and the Muslim breakaway which accentuated the political divisions in India.