India Conquered: Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire
by Jon Wilson (Simon & Schuster, £25)
The ties between Britain and India run deep. It’s a relationship that stretches back at least 400 years and if you look at their family trees, many British families have links to India. The country plays a romantic part in the British imagination and since Brexit such imperial nostalgia has made a comeback. The prime minister Theresa May, on her recent trip to India, talked up “Global Britain”—a term that echoed the time when Britain ruled the waves. But this wistful vision has a tendency to collide with political reality. In this case the Indians demanded to be treated as equals in matters of immigration, especially when it came to university students. The prime minister wasn’t so keen on that and came back snubbed, the Indian press dubbing her “muddled May.”