Hell or Connaught!

Hell or Connaught!: The Cromwellian Colonisation of Ireland 1652-1660 by Peter Berresford Ellis, 252 pages

Catholic Ireland revolted against the Protestant rule of Charles I in 1641.  By 1644 the Irish were supporting the King against Parliament, and after the execution of the King in 1649 the Roundhead army arrived in Ireland to end resistance by fire and sword and, most deadly of all, starvation.  Hundreds of thousands of Irish, perhaps as much as a quarter of the population, perished and thousands more were enslaved and transported to the New World.  In Ireland itself, the decision was made to isolate the native Catholic population in the province of Connaught, the northwestern quarter of the island, with the lands thus depopulated to be given as pay for the Commonwealth soldiery and the London investors who backed the campaign.

The story of this decision, the effort made trying to put it into effect, and the pain it engendered are the primary themes of Ellis' history of the period.  There are other important narratives here, too, including the impact of land speculation, the religious sectarian divides among the colonists, the internal politics of the Commonwealth, ultimately resulting in its end, and the disappointments of the Restoration.  Ellis tells these stories, and more, including the long running personal feud over the survey of Ireland, in a straightforward manner that nevertheless manages to incorporate primary sources and contemporary poetry to provide a complete picture of a crucial moment in Irish history.

British in India

The British in India: A Social History of the Raj by David Gilmour, 525 pages

For better than three hundred years, the British were in, and increasingly over, India, first in the form of the East India Company, later as direct representatives of the Empire.  Who they were, why they came, and how they lived are the subjects of David Gilmour's sweeping social history, a pointillist study which sketches the human face of the British presence on the subcontinent.

As a social history, this is not to be confused with a more conventional political or military history, and a basic knowledge of British and Indian history is required to make much sense out of it.  Gilmour admirably resists the natural temptation to put the more interesting oddities in the foreground while leaving the boring commonplaces in the background.  Even more remarkably, he largely abstains from value judgments, allowing the lives of his subjects to speak for themselves without authorial editorializing.  Unfortunately, this does nothing to moderate the at-times overwhelming amount of information Gilmour presents, but so many of the anecdotes he has uncovered are entertaining or enlightening that the reader is likely to find being lost amongst them a delight rather than a chore.

From the Ruins of Empire

From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia by Pankaj Mishra, 310 pages

In From the Ruins of Empire Pankaj Mishra examines the careers of three prominent Asian intellectuals from the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, all of whom struggled with the cultural, economic, and military dominance of the West - not only as such power was deliberately, oftentimes violently, exercised, but also as the uncritical embrace of the mechanistic, utilitarian Western worldview by modernizing elites in their homelands.  Each of the three represents a third of non-Russian Asia - itinerant journalist Jamal al-Din al-Afghani for the Islamosphere, scholar and activist Liang Qichao for the Sinosphere, and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore for the Subcontinent.  Each sought freedom for his people, but also a form of modernity that preserved the values of his own culture.

It is possible to go on at great length about the problems of perspective in this book, problems that are only somewhat excused on the grounds that the perspective is that of the subjects.  Understandably, in writing about anti-colonialists Mishra concentrates on the negative impact of colonialism on Asian nations and cultures, but at times he oversimplifies to the point that he falsifies - even a casual reading of Finkel's Osman's Dream (which Mishra cites in his bibliography) demonstrates that the problems of the Ottoman Empire were not only - or even primarily - the result of Western imperialism.  That the reality was somewhat more complicated than Mishra's default narrative of Asians fighting for liberty from Western injustice is implied in the fact that both al-Afghani and Liang were persecuted by their native governments, and both took refuge in the oppressive, racist West - the only one of the three who was consistently safe in his homeland was Tagore, who lived under British rule (and was celebrated in the West, lecturing to packed halls and winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913).

It is possible, again, to go on at great length about the problems of perspective in From the Ruins of Empire, but to do so would obscure the very real value of the book.  Beginning in the eighteenth century, the great civilizations of Asia were confronted with the reality that they were not, after all, the center of the world or of history.  How they adapted not only helps explain the world of today, it also has lessons to teach the West as it begins to discover the same truth.

Was Hinduism Invented?

Was Hinduism Invented?  Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of Religion by Brian K Pennington, 189 pages

There have been extensive debates amongst scholars as to whether the religion known as "Hinduism" exists in continuity with precolonial Indian religion or whether it is an ahistorical construct built by imperialist action and colonial reaction.  According to the latter account, British governors, ethnographers, and missionaries opposed an ideal philosophical, spiritual, "pure" Hinduism to an existent superstitious, worldly, "corrupt" complex of indigenous sects and beliefs.  This concept was seized upon and internalized by Indian modernizers and nationalists.  Pennington rejects this narrative out of hand, noting that it does not do justice to the sincere beliefs of Hindus past and present who maintain that their beliefs and practices are continuous with the precolonial era, and fails to appreciate the extent of discontinuity and development present in every religious tradition.

The bulk of the book is taken up by a discussion of three journalistic sources.  The first is a British missionary publication and the second a British scientific journal, both concentrating on the subcontinent.  Pennington attempts to use these to show how British perceptions of Hinduism were shaped by domestic attitudes, particularly concerning class and Catholicism, and how the encounter with Hinduism affected those attitudes in turn.  The third source is a traditionalist Hindu newspaper from 19th century Calcutta, which he uses to demonstrate how Indians reacted to British criticism of their religion, particularly in the strong assertion of Hindu identity.  He also attempts to use these discussions to contribute to the ongoing debate concerning the nature of the relationship between scholarship, the religions it studies, and the practitioners of those faiths.

Pennington's own preconceptions sometimes creep in at the sides, as when he declares that Willliam Wilberforce could not have genuinely cared about the British lower classes because his politics were insufficiently progressive.  At times it appears that traditionalist and modernist might be better descriptors than the progressive and conservative labels he uses, which have political meanings that do not necessarily overlap with their theological meanings, creating confusion he is obviously aware of but seems unable to escape.  Then there is the epilogue, when in a desperate bid for moral equivalency he conjoins the murder of a missionary by Hindu nationalists to the publication of an insensitive anti-Hindu tract by the Southern Baptists, an offense compounded rather than excused by his immediate denial of any such equivalence.  Still, all in all, the worst thing about the book is its length, far too short for an adequate treatment of such a fascinating subject.