An accomplished and heartfelt account of the people who ran the British Raj in India during the 19th and 20th centuries. It portrays how the original martial approach gradually gave way to a more reformist administrative system that strove to provide modern institutions and services to the masses in the sub-continent. Perhaps the most moving chapters are those that describe the loneliness of the colonial officers, especially those working in isolated posts in the districts, and the travails of life threatening diseases, separation from wife and children for long periods, and the difficulties of adjusting to a humdrum middle class existence back in the UK after retirement. First published in 2005, this was later followed by the author's "The British in India" (2018), a more detailed account. ( )

Read 2011. Good study of life in India during the peak of Imperial power, drawing back a veil on an era of high pomp. Full of good personal anecdote. ( )

After many months of reading nothing but airy-fairy novels. I thought it was high time to get stuck into some serious history again. "Imperial Lives" is a mixed bag, however.

On the plus side, It would be an excellent resource for researchers trying to find out more about the day-to-day lives of the British civil servants who ran India in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I really enjoyed the level of detail and the copious use of anecdotes, which displayed an impressive breadth of research into diaries and memoirs (though the general reader would likely find such minutiae to be tedious).

Overall, however, the book's lack of analytical argument and its hagiographic tone leads me to dismiss it as a bunch of conservative nostalgia for the glory days of the British Empire. The author is not an academic historian, and it shows - he makes no attempt whatsoever to view the men of the Indian Civil Service through a postcolonial lens, and no voice is ever given in the book to the vast multitudes of Indians who found themselves ruled by these men. How are we to take seriously statements such as: "Civilians may have been racially aloof and even dismissive, but they were not racist in the sense that they considered racial difference to be permanent and innate....Their prejudices had little to do with race of the colour of skin. They were expressions of a self-confidence that may have been unattractive but was perhaps not unnatural in citizens of a prosperous country with a large empire and a long and relatively peaceful history of political development". I'm still trying to figure out how someone could be "racially aloof" and "dismissive", yet not also racist.

Along with Indians themselves, women get similarly short shrift in this book, with the wives of Civilians mentioned largely in passing, and being described in more detail only at the very end of the book, in a very slim chapter (which, curiously, makes no reference at all to Margaret MacMillan's book "Women of the Raj" - the definitive work on the "memsahibs"). The author even trots out the tired old cliche that "it was the women who lost us the Empire". There are many historians of women and Empire whose excellent work would surely have persuaded the author otherwise, had he bothered to read it.

In summation - while the research and level of detail is impressive, this book comes across as an uncritical, celebratory (and some might say racist) account of a group of professional men whom the author decided to rescue from historical obscurity. Its conservative interpretation leaves a great deal to be desired - surely we don't need more books about dead white men and their career exploits in far-flung lands?

I'm having the hardest time finishing this book. I really DO want to read it, it just keeps putting me to sleep!! Deep down I believe it is a good book though. The cover is attractive anyway. ( )