"Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire" by C.A. Bayly

CA Bayly's Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire provides an incredibly informative and unembellished discussion of how society, politics, and commerce were structured on the Indian subcontinent when the British East India Company first began expanding its influence and control there on a large scale. In addition, it fosters a deeper understanding of what India's transition into being ruled by a colonial regime entailed, and of the complicated means by which the Company managed to establish hegemony for itself over the autonomous and semi-autonomous territories of the waning Mughal Empire. Military might, the book explains, was only one of several of those means.

The book spans the time between the Company's establishment of military strongholds in Madras and Bengal in the mid eighteenth century, and the series of military and civil uprisings that led to the Company's dissolution and the direct assumption of power by the British Government in the mid nineteenth. During this time, the East India Company had managed to expand its control from a few scattered coastal forts to over half of the Indian subcontinent. The ways it did this varied, and were dependent on the particular social, economic, and political setup of each area that the Company operated in.

The most prominent way was with support from indigenous elements of Indian society, which is discussed extensively in Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire. By explaining how urban financial elites, peasant leaders, and other collaborating Indians constantly provided the British with financial and political support, Bayly highlights the unique nature of the Empire's presence in India, and how it differed from its counterparts in Australia, North America, and the Caribbean. where the British had operated independently and often in spite of the indigenous populations, In India, which already had very strong and highly advanced social and cultural institutions in place prior to European settlement, they were forced to be much more adaptable and acquiescent to the native population's will.

The amount of information that Bayly is able to convey in 230 pages is remarkable, but the consequently dense style of his writing also muddles some of his points. A minor improvement could have been made by extending the book's length, which would have allowed Bayly to write with a little more clarity when discussing especially complex aspects of his subject. Overall, though, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire is an excellent piece of historical writing that will greatly expand most of its readers' understanding of India during what Bayly calls its "first age of colonialism."