I WISH to make it clear to all readers, critical or casual, of this book that it is not a history of India. It deals only with the history of the English in India, and embodies an attempt to analyse the difficult and anxious problems arising out of circumstances unique in the history of mankind.
Nor is this book merely a livre de circonstance. It would be affectation to deny that its publication has been precipitated by the present crisis in Indian affairs, but I have, in fact, been working on the subject-intermittently of course -for many years, and am now led to publish the results of my work in the hope of making a modest contribution to the solution of a problem as difficult as any that ever confronted an Imperial Power.
The solution must evidently be sought in conjunction with the best minds, British and Indian, in India itself; but the ultimate responsibility for finding it lies on the Parliament and the Electorate of the United Kingdom. There can, I am convinced, be no hope of finding it without a clear apprehension of the essential conditions of the problem; nor can that be attained without a knowledge of the historical background. To present a rough sketch of that background, and to analyse the constituent elements of the problem, is the purpose of this book.
I have, of course, made some use of the more accessible primary sources, of dispatches, constitutional texts, official reports, and so forth, and in addition have incurred a heavy debt to previous writers on the subject. I have avoided, as far as possible, footnotes which in a book intended not for specialists but for the general reader seem to me pretentious and superfluous. But I hope I have included in a short bibliographical appendix all the works to which I am most indebted. Should there be any omissions representing debts long ago incurred and long since forgotten I crave pardon. There are however, two obligations which I must more specifically acknowledge. The first is to the works of the late Sir William Wilson Hunter, at whose feet I sat, and whose friendship I enjoyed, during the later years of his life, and whose premature death left a great work on British India less than half completed, and deprived English historical literature of what promised to be a real magnum opus.
I owe a heavy debt, also, to Sir William Hunter's accomplished assistant, my friend and former pupil, Mr. P. E. Roberts, now Fellow and Vice-Provost of Worcester College, Oxford. Mr. Roberts has read nearly the whole of this book in proof and I am grateful to him for several valuable suggestions, but his revision was unavoidably rapid, and for any errors which have survived it I alone am responsible. It is proper to add that I have borrowed to a small extent from two chapters in my England since Waterloo (Methuen & Co., Ninth Edition, 1930), and from three articles contributed in 1931 to The Fortnightly Review-in both cases by kind permission.
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