The Ruling Caste

[A] lavishly enjoyable book. —Tunku Varadarajan The Wall Street JournalBetween 1837 and 1901 fewer than one thousand Britons at any one time managed an empire of 300 million people spread over the vast area that now includes India Pakistan Bangladesh and Burma. How was this possible and what were these people like? The British administration in India took pride in its efficiency and broad-mindedness its devotion to duty and its sense of imperial grandeur but it has become fashionable to deprecate it for its arrogance and ignorance. In The Ruling Caste a balanced witty and multi-faceted history David Gilmour goes far to explain the paradoxes of the Anglo-Indians showing us what they hoped to achieve and what sort of society they thought they were helping to build. [A] dense and impressive new book on the civil administrators of Victoria''s Indian Empire . . . Gilmour is a serious historian. He writes accessibly and even wittily with a wealth of anecdotage and an eye for the telling story. —Shashi Tharoor The Washington PostMr. Gilmour is a stylish and engaging writer . . . [He] does make the case that the civilians however tarnished their cause in modern eyes deserve better than they get in A Passage to India. —William Grimes The New York Times