Nicholas B. Dirks is the Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and History, and Vice President for Arts and Sciences and Dean of the Faculty, at Columbia University.
["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" (05/13/2006)
[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" (07/31/2006)
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 "
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"
(12/01/2006)
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"
(04/01/2007)
Ý"The Scandal of Empire"¨ returnÝs¨ 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" (05/13/2006)
ÝDirks¨ 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...ÝA¨ brilliant series of reflections. -- Linda Colley
"The Nation" (07/31/2006)
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.
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