The original Cambridge History of India published between 1922 and 1937 did much to formulate a chronology for Indian history and describe the administrative structures of government in India. The New Cambridge History of India series, to which Thomas R. Metcalf's book belongs, is designed to take full account of recent scholarship and changing conceptions of South Asia's historical development. Ideologies of the Raj examines the ways in which the British sought to justify and thus legitimate their rule over India. Thomas Metcalf demonstrates eloquently that the British devised two divergent strategies to justify their authority: one defined essential characteristics which the Indians shared with the British themselves, while the other emphasized the presumed qualities of enduring 'difference'. Overtime, however, it was the differences - differences of history, race, gender and society -which embedded themselves most deeply in the British idea of India, and so became predominant. Since the British constructed few explicit ideologies of empire, the author explores the workings of the Raj through a study of its underlying assumptions as revealed in policies and writings. This timely book fills an enormous gap in scholarship as the author, drawing from his own research as well as from the writings of younger scholars in India and elsewhere, provides us with a synthetic view of the ideologies of the Raj during the years of uncontested British supremacy from 1858 to 1918.In short this is an excellent book, well argued and well written that will be useful for students and to the educated reader.

I am very interested in learning about India and Indian Culture, as I am planning to marry an Indian man who was born and raised in Bombay, however my fiance is extremely Westernized and would love to live in the United Sates as well as India. In fact, he loves Hollywood Blockbuster movies, while I actually prefer foreign films. Anyway, as I may end up living in Bombay someday, I wanted familiarize myself wih the history of the country and culture of the people. While the authors of this particular book are obviously very well educated and experts on the subject, the content of the material is written in such a dry, unimaginative manner that I have pretty much given up on finishing it. It seems hard to believe that book written about a country with such a vibrant, colorful past could be so boring! For a person such as myself who really needed to start from the basics, this book was much too detailed and academic to hold my interest. However, I am sure other professors and those people who are more familiar with the subject matter may find this book of great use to them. Needless to say, I was disappointed with it, as it wasn't quite what I was looking for in reading material regarding this particular subject.

Read this book if you want dry fact after dry fact with zero entertainment value. Pure torture. I feel sorry for any student who is assigned this one.

A Concise History Of India is the collaborative work of Barbara Metcalf (Professor in the Department of History, University of California, Davis) and Thomas Metcalf (Professor of History and Sarah Kailath Professor of India Studies, University of California, Berkeley). Their work focuses on the fundamentally political theme of the imaginative and institutional structures that changed and sustained both the colonial and an independent India. A Concise History Of India documents both the social changes and the rich cultural life that arose from the political structure and evolving social categories and concepts such as "caste", "Hindu", "Muslim", and "India". Earlier chapters cover the period of the Muslim dynasties preceding colonial conquests, and concludes with the dramatic events of the 1990s including economic change, religious nationalism, and India's emergence as a nuclear power. With an informative, scholarly text enhanced with illustrations and quotations taken from historical sources, A Concise History Of India is recommended for academic reading lists and reference collections, as well as the non-specialist general reader with an interest in understanding India's contemporary political and economic relationships with the community of nations in general, and Pakistan in particular.