The Scandal of Empire

This is a brilliant work of historical excavation that exposes the foundation of modern Britain in the scandals of empire. Dirks shows that, contrary to the imperialist ideologues then as now, the scandals of conquest, violence, and oppression were at its center, not its incidental sideshow. Civilizing the "native" necessarily entailed the practice of barbarism, the assertion of imperial sovereignty required the exercise of despotism. We will never be able to look at either British history or imperialism without the record of repression and double-speak at their very heart. -- Gyan Prakash, Princeton University
By assiduously drawing out necessary connections between European 'corruption' and imperial sovereignty in eighteenth-century British India, this lucid and masterful interpretive essay serves as a timely reminder that modern empires, caught in ideological contradictions of their own making, are fundamentally unpleasant, oppressive, and immoral formations. A stimulating contribution to contemporary debates. -- Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of Provincializing Europe
In this timely and important intervention on empires--both past and present--Nicholas Dirks makes a compelling critique of Britain's imperial relation to India. Scandal, conquest, and empire, he argues, were central to the making of modern Britain. This is a seminal contribution to current debates on empires--their rise, decline and fall. -- Catherine Hall, University College London
Dirks, dean of the faculty and a professor of anthropology and history at Columbia, sets out to dismantle the traditional explanation that Britain's empire in India was, in the famous words of Victorian historian J.R. Seeley, acquired 'in a fit of absence of mind.' According to Dirks, there was nothing accidental about Britain's 'conquest' of the subcontinent in the late 18th century. He argues that public exposure of the East India Company's scandalous corruption by the philosopher and politician Edmund Burke during the Warren Hastings impeachment trial in 1788 persuaded the government to step in and administer what the British regarded as a vulnerable, backward territory. This intrusive, imperialist behavior, claims the author, helped cover up the 'corruption, venality, and duplicity' of Britain's presence in India, which was recast as a civilizing mission that also happened to benefit the British economy. In examining the Hastings case, Dirks scores many points, vaporizing comforting visions of a benevolent empire, and he expertly unravels the complexities of Burke, too often caricatured as a reactionary. * Publishers Weekly *
[The Scandal of Empire] return[s] to the early history of British rule in India to reveal a catalogue of corruption and pillage, at appalling human cost, yet laundered through outrageous myths of imperial self-sacrifice. Dirks is up-front about the parallels: for India you can read Iraq, for Warren Hastings, Halliburton. He makes a frankly polemical and yet powerfully persuasive case. -- Michael Kerrigan * The Scotsman *
[Dirks] focuses mainly on eighteenth-century Britain and on one of its most dramatic political controversies, the impeachment and trial of Warren Hastings, the Governor-General of Bengal from 1774 to 1784...He tells the story passionately and with great intelligence...[A] brilliant series of reflections. -- Linda Colley * The Nation *
Nicholas Dirks's The Scandal of Empire offered me an illuminating look at the historical origins of corruption and scandal in the Indian subcontinent. -- Siddhartha Deb * Times Literary Supplement *
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. -- Philip Harling * American Historical Review *
Because, the author insightfully argues, the British Empire in Asia, and therefore the modern British nation, emerged from scandalous corruption and abuses of the colonized by its founders and practitioners, we must study how Britons of that day and how later historians rhetorically transferred the onus of scandal onto the colonized...Dirks's own extensive research and writing as a historian of India provide him with a perspective that enriches his rereading of the Empire's origins in scandal and elucidates them for scholars and lay readers alike. -- Michael Fisher * Historian *
Makes an important contribution to the burgeoning scholarship dedicated to setting Britain and its empire in the same frame. Dirks acutely identifies and analyzes a fundamental transition in British imperial self-perceptions. From the 1760s to the 1830s, the Company empire was transformed from an enterprise that many Britons saw as morally questionable, into the exact reverse: a morally-inspired civilizing mission. In the process, the “scandalous” origins of empire became elided into a narrative of empire that justified British sovereignty and economic domination. Nor is it an accident, Dirks correctly suggests, that this rebranding of empire occurred in tandem with British state centralization, industrialization, and the consolidation of British nationalism. -- Maya Jasanoff * Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History *