Hugely researched and elegantly written, sensitive to the ironies of the past and brimming with colourful details, [Gilmour's] book has no time for academic jargon or pretentious theorising ... Large numbers arrived with their prejudices fully formed. But Gilmour comprehensively dismantles his friend Edward Said’s argument that the British were uniformly racist and domineering ... Gilmour is interested in human complexity, not in moralistic posturing. Perhaps that is why his books sell, and [oher historians'] don’t.
With The British in India: A Social History of the Raj, Gilmour, metaphorical microscope in hand, has written a broad-ranging but precise and intimate examination of the British men and women who served and lived on the subcontinent ... It is a finely wrought history of the British in India that does not really examine what the British did to India — or to Indians ... Part of the pleasure of this book is that Gilmour has clearly spent eons of time scouring archives for diaries and letters, and has a real feel for domestic life. Some of the best sections concern relations between the sexes ... Gilmour does not offer much in the way of assistance to people who may be unfamiliar with the workings of the British administration in India, or the contours of Indian history, but he is so wide-ranging and diligent that it almost doesn’t matter ... But some of the gaps in his story eventually become glaring ... [Gilmour's conclussion] is a straw man, and about as convincing as several of his comparisons between British imperialists and modern NGOs.
The [book's structure's] success owes as much to its simplicity as to Mr. Gilmour’s remarkable feel for detail, perspective and proportion ... The British in India isn’t merely colorful trivia. Mr. Gilmour grapples with systematic injustices and suffering and the frequent debility and loneliness of the Anglo-Indian lot ... Mr. Gilmour’s command of primary and secondary texts imbues these stock types with nuance and humanity ... The erudition, balance and wit of The British in India are in keeping with Mr. Gilmour’s superb Anglo-Indian biographies...
