| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Nicholas B. Dirks. The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2006. Pp. xviii, 389. $27.95.

This is a robust polemic with which historians of the late eighteenth-century British state as well as the late eighteenth-century British empire will have to contend, not least because Nicholas B. Dirks convincingly argues that the two were inextricably linked. His main contentions are that the British Empire in India was founded on scandal, that the subsequent effort to reform what was purported to be "the private and indiosyncratic excesses of venality and corruption" (p. 31) in India legitimated and naturalized imperial domination, and that, as the nineteenth century progressed, "the principal scandals of Britain's global engagements ... [were] expunged from the imperial record, and then shifted inexorably onto the colonized subjects of empire" (p. 34). The scandals perpetrated by the East India Company's servants were legion. Robert Clive, Paul Benfield, and a good many smaller fish, for instance, made off with fortunes amassed from bribe-taking, and extracted extortionate "presents" and interest on loans from rival contenders for supremacy in the Mughal successor states. While the Company frequently insisted that it held its privileges on sufferance from the Mughals and the British Parliament, it unfailingly acted as a sovereign state that had full legal authority to wage war, aggrandize territory, and collect taxes, all of which it did at a prodigious rate. Finally, the Company's stakeholders took full advantage of its political domination to cash in on the inequitable and unfair terms of trade that the Company secured and enforced, not only within India, but across Asia by means of a "country trade" that was dominated by Company "servants" bent on carrying fortunes home with them.

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