The tears of the Rajas

Among the stained glass windows of Westminster Abbey is a memorial to Donald Smith, Lord Strathcona, who was born in 1820 and died in 1914, commended as a ‘great Canadian imperialist and philanthropist’. The word ‘imperialist’ leaps out as an anachronism to the viewer of 2016, but was a high commendation in 1919 when the window was dedicated. In subsequent years the British empire collapsed, was transformed to form the geographical basis of the modern Commonwealth, and has received differing treatments at the hands of historians and biographers, above all since Indian independence and the creation of the state of Pakistan in 1947. Niall Ferguson's 2003 television series and book on Empire (Allen Lane, 2003) was dismissed in a Guardian article at the time by the author of one of the two books reviewed here, Jon Wilson, as presenting ‘the acceptable face of imperial brutality ... based on a version of the history of empire that is simply wrong’. As the 70th anniversary of the end of British rule over India approaches in 2017, the polemic over whether the whole venture was, on balance, good or bad, still rages on, with more (from William Dalrymple, inter alia) in the pipeline

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