Rise and Fulfilment of British Rule in India? It makes one think of Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, of B. D. Basu's Rise and Consolidation of the Christian Power in India, of the Cambridge History of British India, and The Indian Empire. The title is entrancing—and not a little enigmatic: for the authors never tell the reader in so many words what exactly they mean by ‘fulfilment.’ Whatever it be, this History of the British Raj is as lively as the Cambridge tomes are stodgy, and as impartial as Major Basu is partizan: it refutes its own motto—a saying of the Iron Duke—’that the public mind cannot be brought to attend to an Indian subject.’ Nothing is more needful to-day than that the British mind should thus attend: it will henceforth be able to do so, thanks to Messrs. Thompson and Garratt, without tears, though perhaps not without a good deal of mortification.

‘It is often said,’ observe our authors (p. 273), ‘that Britain acquired her Indian Empire in a fit of absent-mindedness: the epigram has been overworked. From Clive’s time onwards, British India never lacked minds seeing and planning far ahead.’ True, the Empire began as a mercantile adventure—and ‘of all the European interloping nations we were the last and most reluctant to draw the sword, even in defence’ (p. 5). Yet already in 1618 Sir Thomas Roe said: ‘Assure you, these people are best treated with the sword in one hand and caducean in the other’ (p. 17); and by 1641 the East India Company had fortified its factory at Masulipatam.